


Orbital Resonance

by orphan_account



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Adoption, COVID-19, CW: Cults, CW: past abuse, Coronavirus, I mess up Eren, I'm writing this as i go, Jearmin - Freeform, M/M, No one will be sick, Post-Break Up, Quarantine, So I don't even know if Armin and Jean will get together in the end, and they were ROOMMATES, coping with break ups, discussions of space, mild Self-harm, millenial woes, no one is sick, or fandom interpretation of Eren, past Jeanmarco - Freeform, prepare yourself, social distancing, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:28:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24241336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Jean is in a deep depression when the Shelter-in-Place order goes into effect New York City. Bracing himself for even more solitude, he encounters an old high school acquaintance who has been living in his building for months without him realizing. Initially wary of opening up to Armin, Jean begins to use him as a sounding board for figuring out what has gone wrong in his life so far and starting to imagine where it could go.AN: I think the characterizations of some of the characters may not fit what people expect, and I haven't read a chapter in months and months. I started writing this months ago, stopped, then abruptly decided to just sit down and write it, and I think my thought process is still like . . . not mature here. I think this is the first step towards processing something and growing, but it's imperfect and Jean's growth is not . . . a lot in this story. It is what it is.
Relationships: Armin Arlert/Jean Kirstein, past Marco Bott/Jean Kirstein - Relationship
Comments: 26
Kudos: 17





	1. First Contact

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, I just wanted to give a general heads up before you start reading; this does deal with COVID-19, but I have not had the virus or had anyone close to me contract it. I don't live in New York city either, and so I'm worried about appropriating situations that I am not directly experiencing. I am, however, an American living through this pandemic and trying to process my feelings about it, so that's really part of what this fic is doing for me! I would appreciate all comments and reviews, but I really understand if this is not your cup of tea. Please take care of yourselves! :)

Jean is drunk when he first hears someone voice the possibility of a stay-at-home-order. He is slumped on his bed, the tingling buzz just beginning to turn sluggish, when shouting penetrates his thin walls. The next-door neighbor man thinks they should leave before Trump orders the city to be quarantined. The next-door neighbor woman thinks they will be safer where they are. The next morning Jean winces awake to the sound of heavy suitcases thumping down the stairs.

On Friday morning, March the 20, the order is splashed across every one of Jean’s social media feeds: shelter in place, New York City. His phone buzzes all day with texts—people he hasn’t talked to in weeks, or sometimes months, checking in. He answers most of them with quick assurances, pausing to stew for a couple hours over the one he was dreading and hoping for the most. The stewing involves popping his vape into his mouth and huddling on the edge of his bathtub, musing to himself that if he’d bought any pens recently, he’d probably be back on his smoking habit again. Finally, he manages to put the vape away and answer that message too. Then he turns off his phone and pours himself the last of his whisky.

Some days later—two? three?—he eats his last can of soup and realizes he needs more sustenance if he’s actually going to sustain himself for . . . who knows how long. So, he wraps an old bandana around his face to venture out to the corner store.

His building is eerily quiet when steps out of his apartment, so he stomps down the hallways and storms down two flights of stairs to fill the space with sound. Some dim part of his brain remembers that most of the other tenants were slumming students from Colombia; they used to have raucous parties every weekend here. Now he doesn’t run into a single person on his way out. Perhaps they have gone upstate to their families’ second homes. Or their families’ penthouses in the city. Or maybe they’re keeping quiet vigils in their tiny apartments, praying the virus will pass them by.

Jean jumps off the last step and into the grungy lobby, his boots hitting the floor with a satisfying thud. The defiance thrills him for a half second before silence comes rushing back.

The city that never sleeps was never supposed to be this still.

He’s saved from his existential crisis when the front door cracks open, a slight figure shouldering in, laden with bags. Jean freezes, remembering he’s not supposed to get within a certain distance of others. How much was it supposed to be? Six feet? Ten? He’s never been particularly good at paying attention to rules, in fact he’s built part of his identity around flouting them, but now there are stakes now he’s never faced before. Pain and death, for instance.

The person ignores him as they shuffle over to a door on Jean’s right, fishing in a coat pocket for their keys. Jean notes the snow flaking off their hood and shrugs his own jacket closer in anticipation. God, why is it still so cold in March? He’s scheming at how to get past this person in such a narrow space when their arm jostles one of their bags, a cacophony of cans spilling onto the floor. The person swears as they stoop to collect them. Two roll up against Jean’s steel toes.

It’s just silly not to pick them up now. Once they’re in Jean’s hands, however, he realizes he has no idea what to do with them.

“Thanks. Put them by the wall, please, I’ll get them later.” The person—light, matter-of-fact voice—gestures with their elbow. Jean complies, wincing an apology their way.

They simply nod to him. Their hood falls back, and cool blue eyes meet his, an uncanny twinge of familiarity pings Jean’s memory.

It takes a few careful minutes of thinking to put a name on the face, and when he does, he’s so startled by his discovery he nearly yells.

“Armin Yeager?”

It’s the person’s turn to wince as they stuff the last groceries back into the bag. Still, they don’t excuse themselves into their apartment, turning to face him with apparent calm. As soon as they’re looking directly at each other, Jean knows he’s perfectly right. Armin’s blond hair is longer now, brushing against his chin, and the visible parts of his face sharpened with age, but Jean remembers the incongruity of Armin’s heavy eyebrows on his otherwise cherubic face. Even the cloth mask covering his nose and mouth can’t quite conceal the clash of features.

“So, you didn’t recognize me at Connie’s party.”

Jean blinks. “Connie . . . third-floor Connie, the one who gets stoned and plays endless rounds of Oasis?”

The person—Armin—nods.

Jean racks his brain for the last time he actually bothered to go to one of Connie’s parties. He would have needed to have already had a few drinks at a bar and come back into the building while it was happening . . . to hear the music on the landing and think, “Why the hell not?” . . . and the last time Jean went out to the bar was when he and . . . was before he started buying multiple bottles of whiskey at a time from the corner liquor store . . . which would have been . . .

“November,” he says aloud, horrified. “You’ve been here since November?”

Armin turns the key in his lock. “Actually,” he says, still bafflingly calm, “My lease started in September. I think you carried one of my boxes into the building without noticing me, but you said hello to me at Connie’s party, so I assumed you had finally recognized me.”

He disappears into his apartment while Jean tries to process this. He doesn’t really remember this party. He must have spent half of it furiously texting, if he’s right about the timing, and the other half of it shamelessly waving at people just to feel their attention on him. He leans his head against the wall and groans, pulling back abruptly when Armin comes back for his remaining groceries.

“Look,” Jean begins, and Armin puts down his bags to listen politely. Well, Armin had always been polite, hadn’t he? Polite in the way where you have no idea what he’s thinking about, except that you’re fairly certain he’s quietly judging you. “I was . . . not really paying attention to a lot of things last fall, and I just now realized you were here in the building and . . . I mean, it has been ten years.”

He doesn’t need to say it defensively, but he does. Everything about last fall makes him defensive, and he hates that he’s already admitted to Armin—someone from his _high school_ , for fuck’s sake!—that anything about his life was so wrong.

And, even more irritatingly, Armin just shrugs. “Yes, it has been a very long time. And we barely knew each other anyway. It’s nothing to feel guilty about and I didn’t think anything of it.”

He picks up his groceries and carries them inside. When he comes back out with a disinfecting wipe his hand, Jean quickly steps back from the cans.

“You really think I have it?” he tries to joke, but it comes off somewhere between offended and worried.

Another shrug. “I’m going to wipe down everything anyway. I’m not particularly worried, but it will reduce risk.”

“Oh.”

Armin swipes the wipe once over each can, starting back to his open door. “I hope you’re doing as well as you can be, Jean.”

And that’s it. Another weirdass encounter in a city that’s usually teaming with such possibilities, all the way on the opposite side of the continent from where they first met.

“Shouldn’t we like, have coffee or something?” Jean blurts, still hovering by the stairs.

Armin turns slowly to face him, eyes coolly unreadable. “Do you _want_ to have coffee?”

It had just seemed like something one ought to say to when meeting a high school classmate for the first time in ten years. Jean does not particularly want the coffee or the connection, and he considers confessing this, but then some deep, distant part of his brain stirs with curiosity. This is a chance to re-encounter his ancient past, his primordial self, a person who has eroded into the husk he is now.

“I mean, it’s weird, right?” Jean finds himself saying. “It’s the beginning of a new decade, and you meet someone you used to know in Bumfuck, Idaho—sorry, Trost—” he mutters the apology even though he doesn’t feel sorry at all. He remembers belatedly that Armin belonged one of the many religious communities in their small town, probably one of the ones that doesn’t swear . . . except hadn’t he just been cursing over his dropped groceries? “Look, it’s just kinda surreal, right?”

“So, you want to have coffee with me,” Armin says slowly. “Because it’s surreal.”

Jean scrutinizes his old classmate, wondering if he’s being mocked. Talking with Armin for a few minutes after so many years, he recalls part of the reason he had found the other man so hard to figure out when they were teens. Jean has always been fairly good at reading people—when he’s sober—and he _can_ read Armin, but it’s difficult, even without a mask obscuring half his face. He has to pay attention to these micro-expressions, little twitches of the mouth or eyebrow, quick glances of the eye, and it is a whole lot of effort. That’s why Jean likes to be so open himself, and why he’s always preferred open people like—

He clears his throat and tries out one of Armin’s careless shrugs.

“You got anything better to do? And we live in the same building, if one of us already has the other one probably does too.”

Armin crosses his arms over his chest. Jean tries not to take it personally that he does not immediately say yes. After all, Jean was the one who hadn’t recognized him after months of living in the same building. And he’s still not sure this is what he really wants himself. He left Idaho for a reason. If he were in a better place, maybe he wouldn’t even consider this meeting.

“Alright,” Armin finally answers. “Tomorrow at four work for you?”

Jean grins behind his bandana. “I’ll fit that into my busy schedule.”

Armin rolls his eyes. And it blows Jean’s mind.

In high school, Armin had been in all of Jean’s advanced courses, but he’d hardly spoken. He had a bit of a bowl cut then, and he dressed like he was going to try to hand you a Book of Mormon, all tucked-in button-ups and ironed pants. Jean had always suspected—again, from eyebrow quirks and tiny shifts in his expression—that some emotions lurked under his serious surface, but he’d never seen one so clearly.

Well, ten years can mean a lot.

“See you then, Jean.”

* * *

The next day, Jean washes his hands three times in a row before he goes downstairs to meet with Armin. He really doesn’t think he has COVID-19, but everyone in the bodega down the street had been so skittish yesterday that he feels like he just ought to be careful. And then, remembering that Armin had wiped down his cans with disinfectant, Jean ties his bandana around his face again.

When Armin opens the door maskless, Jean feels very silly indeed.

“So, what’s the deal?” he asks, pointing to the flimsy fabric covering his mouth and nose. “Do we do this, or nah?”

Armin’s lip twitches. Is it a smile?

“You can if you want, but if I’m letting you into my house the risk is high whether you wear the mask or not.”

“So why are you doing it?” Jean asks even as he loosens the bandana and steps inside at Armin’s gesture, peering around. Just like Jean’s apartment, it’s small and dimly lit, with peeling white paint and creaking linoleum. Unlike Jean’s apartment, it’s pretty clean; the only bits of untidiness are stacks of thick books on the tiny dining table and on the floor by the couch. Otherwise, the whole room is kind of neutral and impersonal, with very little decoration aside from a framed generic map of the solar system on one living room wall.

When his gaze makes it back to Armin, he’s still not sure if the other man is smiling. “You’re the one who wanted to come over.” He reminds Jean as he squeezes into the narrow kitchen. “I know you mentioned coffee earlier, but I only have the instant stuff. And some tea.”

“Instant is fine,” Jean says, suppressing a grimace. “Well, I mean, it’ll do.”

Armin does laugh at that. “I’m sorry. I keep it around for other people to drink. I’m not even sure if it’s still in date. Have a seat.”

There’s a click followed by the rushing sound of water being heated in a kettle. Jean complies with Armin’s directions, settling into a dining room chair while running his eyes over the tomes piled on the table. _Enceladus and the Icy Moons of Saturn. The Saturn System Through the Eyes of Cassini. Titan Unveiled: Saturn’s Mysterious Moon Explored._

“Huh,” he says to himself.

“What’s that?” Armin calls, head poking out from behind the refrigerator.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Jean presses, peeling his eyes from the books. “Why did you agree to this, if it’s so risky?”

For a moment the only sounds are the clinking of ceramic, and then Armin appears again, carrying two mugs. Again, they’re generic; brown and red stripes. Jean is beginning to sense an aesthetic for adult Armin. He’s still wearing a button-down shirt, but it fits him better than his high school outfits and it’s not tucked in. And he pairs it jeans instead of slacks. Maybe the fact that the cups are striped instead of plain white is symbol of adult Armin’s rebellion.

Or maybe Jean’s overthinking things. Again. Armin is an adult man and obviously some kind of scientist. He probably doesn’t think about aesthetics at all.

Jean takes the proffered mug and sniffs it while Armin sits across from him. It’s . . . instant coffee, alright.

“Well, just like you, I was curious,” Armin answers as he takes the seat opposite Jean. “It’s one thing to see someone in the hall from time to time and another to actually talk to them.”

Jean takes a sip of the coffee to punish himself for failing to notice that Armin was living in the same building as him for almost six months. It’s so hot, it burns his tongue, but that numbs him to the taste, so maybe it’s for the best.

“Not that we ever talked that much in high school anyway,” Armin adds, stirring his tea with a spoon like it’s the most interesting activity in the world. “But since the opportunity is here, I might as well take it.”

He takes a sip from his cup, and the reality of what they’re doing hits Jean. He doesn’t actually know the man sitting across from him at all, no matter how familiar his face is. Where exactly is he supposed to begin?

Well, there’s always the usual.

“So, you just moved here this year? Did you come straight from Idaho?”

He vaguely remembers something about Armin heading off to Trost Community College after graduation. He also remembers not being surprised about that. Armin’s family had been pretty tightly knit. Creepily so, in teenage Jean’s opinion.

“Actually, I’ve been in the city for four years. I just moved to this building after my old roommate graduated and I couldn’t afford the rent there on my own.”

“Oh—” Jean begins, not sure why this information makes him feel so weird. Armin has been here for quite a while then. Longer than Jean, in fact. That’s . . . weird.

“And before that,” Armin continues, “I was at Cal Tech, in Pasadena. And now I’m finishing my PhD at Colombia.”

“Your PhD in astronomy,” Jean supplies. Armin’s eyes slide to the books between them. He nods, curtly.

Jean’s stomach is twisting itself in knots. Maybe it’s the coffee, but he thinks it might be jealousy, although he’s never wanted a PhD in anything, let alone astronomy. Space? No thanks, that’s some freaky shit. No, he’s jealous because Armin is here. Only Jean was supposed to make it here. Not New York City specifically, but _a_ city, a place teaming with life and culture and ideas. He’s jealous because Armin being here— _beating_ him here, to be honest—means that he isn’t all that special after all.

But that’s something he’s been reconciling himself to for the past year or so now anyway.

He opens his mouth to snap something, he doesn’t know what, but when he looks over at Armin, he finally sees how tense the other man is. Armin’s small chin is stuck out, and his eyes, even though they aren’t quite meeting Jean’s, are bright. He expects a fight, he’s bracing himself for it. No—he kinda seems like he _wants_ one.

Another Jean might have taken him up on that offer. Another Jean might even have been extremely curious about this development; in high school, it had been Armin’s (adopted?) brother Eren who picked fights, yelling at the top of his lungs about “culture wars” while Armin quietly concentrated on his work in the background. But 2019 had taken all the fight out of Jean, so he decides to withdraw.

“Look,” he says, setting down his cup. “I don’t want to do this thing where we like, compare ourselves and shit. I mean, I kinda did when I showed up here, but like—I can already tell you, you’ve won. That’s some legit stuff. I’m just a washed-up artist. I didn’t even finish my MFA.”

Armin frowns. “You just compared yourself just there though; you said I ‘won.’ It’s not about ‘winning’ if our goals are completely different.”

“You were squaring up, bro.” Jean realizes he’s pointing, an aggressive gesture, and quickly puts his hand back on the table.

“I—I wasn’t.”

More pieces of Armin’s shell seem to be flaking away now. He’s runs a slightly agitated hand through his hair, then gives himself the tiniest of shakes.

“Honestly, I wasn’t trying to fight with you. When you brought up Trost, I thought you assumed I’d been with the Yeagers up until this point. And that you were judging me about it.”

The Yeagers. Not “my family.” The Yeagers.

Interesting.

“I did think that,” Jean admits. “I thought you were close.”

This earns him a tight smile from Armin.

“We existed in a certain proximity to each other, yes.”

“Proximity?” Jean splutters, surprised. “You were basically in Eren’s shadow for the whole time I knew you.”

Armin’s back to sticking out his chin. “Well, as we’ve established, you didn’t know me.”

There’s not much Jean can say to that. It’s just the truth.

He raises his hands in a symbol for “truce.”

“You’re right, I made assumptions. But, just to set the record straight, I didn’t think you that you like, wanted to _be_ Eren or something stupid like that. I just thought . . . you couldn’t get away from him . . . neither you or Mikasa could . . .”

He trails off, realizing belatedly that he’s not painting a very flattering picture of his high school impressions of Armin. Probably he’s about to get kicked out of the first sober conversation he’s had with another human in a long while, and, surprisingly, he’s finding himself a bit sad about it. Honestly, adult Armin is turning out be more interesting than he’d anticipated.

But Armin doesn’t yell at him or even seem to get angry. Instead he fidgets, scratching his forearms lightly while staring into his tea. Then he sighs and straightens, locking eyes with Jean’s.

“You’re righter about that than I would like. It was a bit . . . difficult, but when I turned eighteen, I had a bit more control and I sort of . . . eased my way out. I transferred to Cal Tech after two years at the community college, and I got lucky with some scholarships and government funding. And part time jobs. Mikasa is still in Idaho, but she works as a nurse in Boise now, so she has bit more distance too.”

Jean sips his now lukewarm coffee to give himself something to do while he thinks these revelations over. He’d guessed that Armin’s home life was probably conservative and controlling, but the way that Armin talks make it sound even more sinister. Like they were people he had to escape. Well, Eren had been a pill.

“It’s just pretty difficult to get out of a cult.”

Jean chokes on his coffee and coughs it out on his pants. By the time Armin gives him a paper towel to dab off his clothes, he finds his voice.

“You were in a cult?!”

“Oh, yeah,” Armin says, tight smile returning as he sits back down. “That’s what the Fellowship of Believers was.”

“I just thought . . . you were, you know, whatever kind of Christian you were. I dunno man, I can’t keep them straight!”

“ _I_ wasn’t anything.” Armin corrects. “The Yeagers were. Are. Probably they’re delighted that their garage stuffed full of prepper shit is coming in handy. Or maybe they’re protesting their impending confinement in Trost’s streets waving their rifles around, I have no idea.”

“Rifles?” Jean asks, his blood turning cold. He shouldn’t be surprised, he did live in a rural-ish community in Idaho, after all. But when you don’t grow up around guns yourself, it’s still a bit hard to picture.

“Yeah,” Armin says, shrugging. “I mean, there was always a shotgun in the house, but Eren really escalated the gun thing as soon as he turned eighteen. I’m sure there’s some kind of arsenal there now. Who knows?”

Jean squints at Armin as the coffee seeps into his clothes. The other man is trying to play it cool, but he’s gone all stiff again. Remembering this past must be difficult for him . . . and yet, he _is_ talking about it. So, Jean decides to pursue it, because fuck it, this is the most curious he’s been about anything in the past few weeks.

“So, you don’t talk to them anymore?”

“Not since I moved out eight years ago,” Armin confirms. “Well, except I talk to Mikasa sometimes. She’s my last connection there, actually.”

Eight years ago. Where was Jean, eight years ago? Sitting on the lawn of the east coast liberal arts college he’d somehow finagled his way into, smoking a cigarette and arguing with someone about some minutiae of leftist politics maybe. Or discovering that he liked kissing boys by kissing a lot of boys. And both of those had felt like a slap in the face to his conservative hometown at the time, but suddenly his road to getting out of that place was looking easier and easier in hindsight.

“What are you thinking?” Armin asks, startling him. For some reason, he hadn’t expected Armin to be so direct. But really, if he’s learning anything today, it’s not to make assumptions about Armin Yeager.

“Just about what a smug bastard I was about getting out of that hellhole high school,” he confesses, smirking apologetically. “And that I’m probably another connection to a place that you don’t want to remember.”

“No!” the vehemence in Armin’s voice catches him off-guard. “That’s not my point at all! That is . . . like I said, it’s not about ‘winning’ or deserving to get out more. And you—you in particular used to say things in high school that helped me see just how . . . not normal, my life was. How not normal anything we were going through was. And that’s . . . honestly why I actually wanted to talk to you.”

He’s turned a bit pink now, and Jean realizes to his own chagrin that his cheeks are heating up a bit too. This is . . . nice. This is affirmative. He doesn’t deserve those things. He has to stop this conversation somehow.

“Well, it’s good you’re out now. I mean, New York has its fair share of cults, but they’re easy enough to avoid. Plus, there’s great hotdogs here.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” Armin mumbles, clearly still struggling against his own embarrassment.

But it’s an opening away from talking positively about Jean, at least. “So am I actually, I dunno why I said that. Also, you’ve lived here longer than me, so you’ve probably had more vegan hotdogs than I have. I should ask you for recommendations.”

Armin deigns to go along with his shift in topic. He cocks his head to one side, considering Jean like a specimen. “For some reason, I wouldn’t have pegged you for a vegetarian.”

“Well, it’s recent. I was convinced.” Jean is realizing his mistake; they’ve turned into dangerous waters. Time to find another out. “But it’s good to know if we catch the plague, we can count on each other to not to bring over chicken noodle soup.”

He doesn’t like the way Armin watches him. Like he’s trying to read Jean’s entrails while they’re still inside his body. It’s uncomfortable, but mostly because Jean isn’t used to hiding himself.

“And how have the last ten years been for you Jean?”

The question, when it finally comes, is a bit of relief. It’s so broad that he can continue to avoid the topic he doesn’t want to talk about, the painful glaring failure in his life right now.

“Well, I went to college in Maryland and then I kinda bummed around for a bit before I finally applied to NYU for art school. But then I took a break, so now I’m just kinda freelancing shit. Mostly drawings for role-playing monster manuals, to be honest.”

It’s supposed to be fun and self-deprecating, but Armin is frowning at him like he’s a puzzle to solve.

“You know, just the typical millennial sob story. And now we get to experience an economic Depression, isn’t that fun?”

Armin finally smiles, which comes as a bittersweet relief to Jean. Pushing someone away feels awful, it’s why Jean hasn’t been seeing anyone lately; there’s no one close enough to push away from the hard truths about himself that even he isn’t ready to face. Seeing Armin in the hallway had sparked some interest in him, something between nostalgia for the way he used to be and curiosity about how everything had become so messed up. Having not seen the middle of Jean’s life so far at all, maybe Armin could maybe offer some new perspectives. But now that he’s presented with the opportunity of laying himself bare, Jean feels unsure and exhausted at the prospect. Besides, no matter what Armin says, he’s pretty sure he’ll sound whiny—what are his struggles compared to escaping a cult?

They lapse into a bit of an awkward silence, no sounds except for the clearing of their throats and the sipping of their drinks. It’s not tense, but it’s not comfortable either.

Finally, Armin ventures, “To be honest, I still don’t know many people in this building. Connie invited me to his party, but I got the impression he invited everyone on the block.”

Jean snorts. Sounds right.

“The point is, I think at a time like this, it’s good to know someone close by, in case you have an emergency.”

“So _that’s_ why you invited me here!” Jean crows. “To call the EMT if you get sick . . .er, sorry. Too real?”

“A bit,” Armin says, though he smiles. “But yes, that was my general point. And also, if you ever just want to be in the same room as another human being.”

“Oh.” The reality of this whole world event starts to sink in. When will they be allowed to go out to bars and parties and or the park or . . . anywhere that isn’t the corner store? “Yeah, I mean, I guess—”

“No obligation,” Armin rushes to say, his face turning faintly pink again.

Jean knows he ought to say yes immediately, but he does take a moment to consider if he’s actually up for this. It’s been two months since he’s interacted with another human on a regular basis who wasn’t the local grocery clerk. He can already tell that this relatively short visit has taken a lot of energy out of him, that he’s probably going to go back upstairs and nap after this, despite the coffee. And yet . . . curiosity . . . Armin is more interesting than he thought. Besides, there’s something chilling about not having the _option_ to interact with another human in person, even if he mostly chooses not to these days.

“So . . . what are you asking exactly? That we like, check up on each other sometimes?”

Armin shrugs. “Not even that, unless we think the other person might be in trouble. Just that we know the other person is here if we need something. The real burden of it would be that if we agree to do this, we should try to avoid contact with others. I would understand if that’s not possible for you though, or you want to make a closed unit with another group. But most of my friends live in other boroughs.”

Jean suppresses a laugh. Yes, there is someone else Jean would much rather ride out a pandemic with, but that’s not an option. And Jean doesn’t want the hushed voices and scrunched up sympathy faces of his friends right now either—that’s why he’s been avoiding them, after all. So, actually, it’s quite perfect that he met Armin again just now. Life has handed him someone who knows Jean enough to want to call the doctor if he’s sick, but not someone who knows how far he’s fallen recently. Besides, if they talk more, Armin’s past sounds interesting enough to keep them from delving too deep into what’s going on with Jean . . . and if Jean’s ever up for it, maybe he can make sense of what’s happened to himself over all these years . . . maybe.

He holds out a hand to Armin. “We should shake on it. There’s no germs between us now, plague-buddy.”

“It’s not a plague,” Armin says, but he takes Jean’s hand anyway. He’s fingers are small and cool to the touch, but his grip is surprisingly firm. “It’s a virus.”

“Don’t tell our president,” Jean says, laughing just because that’s what you do about President Trump. You laugh not to cry. You laugh not claw your own eyeballs out while screaming at the top of your lungs. You laugh to suppress the disturbing fantasy of strangling him in the middle of one of his stupid press conferences.

Armin laughs too.

“I’m sure someone has already informed him.”

They enter their numbers into each other’s phones. Jean doesn’t warn Armin he sometimes turns off notifications for messages to keep himself from obsessing over the messages he’s not getting anymore . . . as if that makes any sense anyway. He probably should stop doing that. Armin might need to send him an S.O.S. Isn’t that the whole point of this? But if he blocks a specific number, he can’t actually get the messages at all, and that isn’t what he wants either . . . whatever, if Armin needs an ambulance, he’ll call 911.

Back in his own apartment a few minutes later, Jean flops face first on his bed, heedless of the half open books and crumpled failed drawings. His head barely hits the pillow before he’s asleep.


	2. Volcanic Activity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: Mild self-harm, discussion of real life politics

Several days slip into each other and Jean doesn’t text Armin. To be fair, Armin doesn’t send any messages to Jean either. They merely exist, to borrow words from Armin, in proximity to each other. Honestly, most of the time Jean forgets about his high-school-classmate-turned-downstairs-neighbor, and when he does remember, he puts off checking in. There’s not supposed to be any pressure, and Jean doesn’t have the energy to do much more than shower, eat, and load up a video game on his janky old laptop most of the time. He naps in between these activities, giving him the sense that time is inconsequential.

But there are some times when he’s acutely aware of every moment, his body alive and in pain, his brain praying for the sweet release of sleep that will never come. He lies in his bed staring at the ceiling in these moments, the whole world unnervingly quiet except for the rabbit-quick pounding of his heart.

On one of these agitated days he receives a series of texts.

_I’m getting a lot of joy out of cooking right now._

_What brings you joy these days, Jean?_

He doesn’t realize he’s slapped himself until his cheek stings.

_nothing dude. nothing brings me any joy or fulfillment at all because i’m fucking depressed_

Then he hurls the phone to other side of the room, smothers his face with a pillow from his bed and screams. He smacks his cheeks three more times for good measure.

After splashing some cold water on his face to wash away the tears and cool his burning skin, he goes to pick up his phone and apologize, wincing with relief when he sees the screen protector has done its job. There’s a whole new slew of messages, however, and each one adds to Jean’s guilt. He apologizes, and yet he’s still left with his anger. Not at the person on the other end, but with himself being such a bastard and the universe with giving him everything he ever wanted and letting him ruin it all.

But these spurts of energy wane as quickly as they come, and Jean comforts himself with the reflection that the malaise is often outlasting the bitterness. If he pretends he doesn’t see the Instagram posts where the love of his life is clearly already moving on, most days can become a stupor. That dullness has to be healing, right? A self-protection mechanism designed to numb him to the prickling pain of life as a twenty-eight-year-old failure.

One afternoon, he falls into one of these healing slumbers only to be startled awake some time later by loud noises from the rooms around him. Above, below, both sides—the sounds come from everywhere. When he sits up, pulse racing and his eyes darting around, his gaze is drawn to his ice-encrusted window. The ruckus is being projected into the dark street, he realizes as his brain fights to catch up with the amount of information he’s receiving.

Running to the window and throwing it open, he pokes his head out into the brisk evening air to see almost everyone else on the street doing the same.

They’re screaming and whooping at the top of their lungs, banging pots and pans. He can’t process what it is they’re saying, can’t understand why they’re doing this.

And it’s in this moment that he finally remembers Armin.

He takes the stairs down to the first floor two at a time, pounding on Armin’s door as soon as he gets there. He thinks he hears muffled swearing from within, but it’s hard to tell over the racket happening everywhere else.

“It’s Jean!” He calls, suddenly realizing that Armin probably doesn’t want to open his door for strangers at a time like this. “Please let me in!”

The bolts scrape back, and Armin’s frowning face appears.

“Get inside! Quick!” The words are barely out of his mouth before he’s tugging Jean in himself, slamming the door shut behind them.

“What the fuck is happening?” Jean demands. “Are they saying words?”

“They’re showing their support for the healthcare workers,” Armin yells, face still pinched tight with annoyance.

As soon as he says it, Jean thinks he catches snippets of phrases. “Healthcare heroes!” “Thank you for your service!”

Anger wells up within him, burning his throat as he grasps for words to express it. Before long, he’s hissing and spitting, erupting at the ceiling above.

“JUST PAY THEM A FUCKING LIVING WAGE, GODDAMMIT!”

And then he kicks the edge of Armin’s couch and screeches when he stubs his toe.

“I hate people!” he declares, hopping up and down.

“Do you hate couches too?” Armin asks icily, raising his eyebrows at Jean’s display of fury.

“Yes,” Jean insists, mutinous. “Yes, I hate couches, and furniture more generally, and all of human civilization. But mostly I hate FUCKING CAPITALISM that declares people heroes to make it seem like they’re VOLUNTEERING TO DIE FOR LOW WAGES.”

He hop-strides over to Armin’s window and yanks it open before the other man can protest. “WHO GUTTED THE HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IN THE FIRST PLACE?”

As he takes a deep breath to scream some more, a surprisingly strong hand grabs the back of his shirt and firmly tugs him down onto the couch.

“What?” Jean challenges, his face still hot with anger. “You don’t agree?”

“Don’t evangelize to me, Marx, I completely agree with you. I’m just worried about your toe and I want to put ice on it. Besides, they can’t hear you over their own voices and I think the cheering is supposed to stop in another ten minutes.”

As soon as Armin says “toe,” Jean feels it throb. He winces and looks down at the bruising skin. Sometimes getting hurt thrills him because it reminds him that he can still feel something, anything. But toes are sensitive stuff and he has a fleeting worry that maybe he’s broken something.

When Armin returns with some ice in a paper towel and holds it to the injured foot, Jean voices this concern. Armin shrugs, which is not exactly reassuring.

“My guess is not, but it will take a bit of time to tell. In any case, this will help reduce the swelling.”

“Thank you, nurses!” echoes from the floor upstairs. But the righteous anger that had so moved Jean is quickly morphing into a gnawing unease.

“Ah, shit,” he says, as Armin gives him control of the makeshift icepack, apparently as satisfied as he can be about Jean’s toe. “I didn’t think about what would happen if I broke something now. Could I go to an ER?”

“Yes,” Armin answers simply, sitting down next to him on the couch with a sigh. “But there would be some risk and the staff would be overwhelmed dealing with virus cases. So, it’ll really be better if it’s just bruised.”

Jean sneaks a peak at the skin underneath the pack. Yikes, that’s purple! He grimaces.

“I guess this what I get for running down here barefoot.”

Armin’s mouth twitches. “I’ll pad my couch next time.”

The comment deflates Jean somewhat, and now that the people upstairs are beginning to quiet down a bit too, he has a moment to pause and feel sheepish. “Ah look,” he begins, running his free hand through his hair. Oof, that’s a bit greasy isn’t it? When was the last time he showered? “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be kicking anything of yours. Or yelling out your window. That was really uncalled for. On so many levels.”

Armin nods absently. “It was a bit . . . sudden. Especially after not talking for so many days. But I understand that anger.” He points to a mess of books in one corner. It looked like he’d thrown a couple. “This pandemic is a lot to handle.”

“Yeah, on top of other things,” Jean mutters before he can stop himself. Armin’s eyes, previously a little bit unfocused, train themselves on his face abruptly, wide and piercing. Jean squirms a bit under the intensity. “We’re millennials, things were shitty for us even before this started.”

The pause drags out a little longer than Jean would like. Finally, Armin looks away and stands up. “True. Would you like something to drink?”

“Sure.” Jean latches onto any subject that isn’t how moodily pathetic he is. “Do you have any whisky to dull the pain?”

Armin shakes his head. “No, I don’t really drink alcohol. I just have tea, instant coffee, water, or the ginger ale I opened a few days ago that’s probably flat by now.”

Mmm. Appetizing.

“Water sounds good, thanks.”

When Armin reappears, he gives Jean a small bottle of ibuprofen along with the glass.

“You can take it if you want. That French study about how it can worsen COVID respiratory symptoms seems to only apply if you already have them.”

Jean pops two of the little pills gratefully. “Honest to God, I have not read any articles about this shit. Or any articles period, really. But I also haven’t left my apartment. Which is good social distancing, right?”

Armin sits down next to him again, smiling in earnest now. “Something like that. I’m sorry I don’t have any whisky. But you’d be welcome to stay and watch something with me to distract your brain for a while, and then we can check on your toe again just to make sure it’s not broken.”

He doesn’t say “because I don’t trust you to check on your toe if left to your own devices,” but Jean hears it in there somewhere. He bristles, fighting off a familiar sense of powerlessness. “I thought your doctorate was in astronomy,” he grumbles, self-hatred compounding on itself when he realizes how petty that sounds.

“I have basic first-aid training,” Armin replies nonchalantly, but some of his hair slides in front of his face and he can’t quite meet Jean’s eyes. Jean closes his own and rubs his forehead, wishing the medicine would kick in faster.

“I’m sorry,” he finally blurts. “That was mean of me, it was just that . . . I know I look like a mess now. I am mess now. I don’t remember the last time I changed out of these clothes and washed myself and I don’t remember what I’ve been eating, and I came down here and I yelled at you and maybe I broke my toe defacing your furniture. But like, you don’t have to take care of me. I can manage on my own, honest.”

The cheers have almost completely stopped now, which would be a relief if it wasn’t replaced by a strange pounding in Jean’s ears. God, he’s so ashamed. Is it worse to just be this pathetic or to go around excusing yourself for said patheticness?

Armin straightens a book on the table in front of them. _Io After Galileo: A New View of Jupiter’s Volcanic Moon._ The sphere on the cover doesn’t look like a moon; more like a molding piece of pizza. Fuck, space is weird.

“I don’t know if this is reassuring, exactly, but I’m not trying to take care of you. I am, in fact, extremely lonely and would just like spend time with another human being in person for a while. Actually, I’m so desperate that we don’t need to necessarily talk, I really would just settle for us watching something together.”

Well, Jean can certainly understand being lonely. And he suspects that the people trapped in their rooms all around them, yelling out their windows to praise the people fighting this pandemic on the frontlines, know a thing or two about just wanting to connect with another person too.

“With me you get two for the price of one,” he says, striving for a lighter tone. “I talk through everything. You’ll be so annoyed that you’ll want to kick me out like fifteen minutes into the movie.”

Armin considers. “That would be irritating if I haven’t seen whatever we watch, but if it’s something I already know I might actually enjoy your reactions.”

Jean smiles. Honest and clear. He can appreciate that.

“Okay, what are our options then?”

He’s a little surprised by the intense gleam that suddenly appears in Armin’s eyes. It’s as if he’s been preparing for this question since they re-encountered each other. “Have you ever seen _The Expanse_?”

“Is it . . . more space shit?”

It is indeed more space shit. As soon as Armin loads it up on his tiny TV, Jean can see from the episode thumbnails it’s all taking place in colorless spaceship hallways lit only by eerie fluorescents. Armin is excitedly reeling off something about cold wars and interplanetary politics, and the amount of animation that suddenly possesses him is a little charming, but something is bugging Jean and he can’t help but try to get to the bottom of it.

“Why space?” he blurts. “From everything I see, your whole life is space.”

“Not my whole life,” Armin replies, a little affronted. “It’s a big part of my life, yes, but I enjoy other things. Anime, strategy video games, postmodern novels—basically anything the Yeagers thought would lead me to Satan. Though I know for a fact that Eren had a secret Xbox he got from Goodwill.”

Jean is once again impressed and slightly disarmed by how casually Armin brings up his difficult past.

“So, being an astronomer is rebellious?”

“Kind of,” Armin qualifies, finger hovering over the play button on his remote. “I mean, the Yeagers did believe in space, they just thought of it as the place where our government put satellites to monitor people. They were afraid of it, like it was an area outside of their control that could be threatening. But I’ve always been weirdly comforted by the idea of its vastness, like everything that happens here matters so little in the grand scheme of the universe, it makes it easier to endure the hard stuff sometimes. Not that I don’t realize how privileged I am most of the time, and I think it’s important to solve Earth’s problems. Just, I like to think of all the ways that so little in our lives is outside of our control, and that it’s not controlled by some kind of higher power, but just kind of a series of coincidences contrived by some basic rules that govern existence. I study those coincidences and I sometimes try to predict them, but I don’t interfere.”

And with that, he starts _The Expanse_.

Jean doesn’t quite follow the show for the first few minutes, he’s still trying to wrap his mind around what Armin revealed to him. The kind of purposelessness Armin has just described scares the shit out of him. Like the Yeagers, he likes to feel in control, but not in such a literal way; more, he likes having the ability to make sense out of everything with stories. His story, for example, was supposed to be one of rising out of a backwater town and finally going somewhere to create something meaningful, all while making interesting friends and acquaintances and finding his soulmate, even though you weren’t supposed to believe in soulmates anymore because it was very passé.

He presses the melting icepack into his toe until it throbs again, effectively distracting himself from this train of thought.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult for him to get into the show. The characters all seem generic to him, like archetypes moving through some basic scenarios of political philosophy. The cop character who obsesses over a missing woman he’s never even met is particularly obnoxious, though Jean can’t summon the energy to care enough to hate him. He opens his mouth several times to make wry comments, but then snaps his mouth shut again when he sees Armin entranced by what’s happening on the screen. This is weird. He’s not used to watching this kind of show or watching something with Armin—in fact, he finds his brain wandering to his phone in his pocket, wishing to text some of his observations to—

More pressure on his injured toe. Water drips to the floor.

After the first episode ends on a bit of a forced cliffhanger, Armin finally turns to Jean. “So, were you lying about talking during movies?”

Jean starts. He hadn’t realized Armin was paying him any attention, he seemed so ensconced.

“Ah, no . . . just . . . it’s actually been a while since I’ve watched anything with another person,” he mumbles in explanation. “Well, it’s been a while since I watched anything.”

He braces himself for the inevitable judgmental question: “so then, what do you _do_ all day during quarantine?” Certainly not his work, the commissions he’s behind on . . .

But Armin doesn’t actually go there. Instead, he admits, “Me too, actually. It’s very hard for me to concentrate on anything these days.”

“But you were glued to the screen just now!” Jean points out, confused.

“Oh yeah, that’s just because I know this well and I really like it. I think this is my fifth time re-watching it.”

Jean turns slowly to face Armin. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why? No offense, but none of these characters are interesting. It’s like they had a bot generate them out of sci-fi tropes.”

He regrets the words once they’re out of his mouth. He’s being too harsh again, too direct. But Armin merely shakes his head. “At first they are, but they slowly grow on you to the point where you’re extremely invested in all of them. Every time I watch it, I’m re-amazed by it, because you’re absolutely right, they’re so boring here.”

“Even the cop gets better?”

“Miller? Oh, no, he’s not that interesting, that’s true. Just a couple good moments, but he doesn’t have much of arc. Which is, in itself, kind of intriguing.”

He’s excited again, smiling and talking fast. He’s a different person from the cool and collected man who opened the door for him or placed ice on his toe. They’re both interesting, Jean decides, and both so unlike the shy and diffident Armin from high school.

“Okay,” he says. “You’ve talked me into another episode. But you better be right.”

* * *

Jean wakes up the early next morning nestled into Armin’s couch. At some point in the night, he had acquired a blanket, something fuzzy and handknitted. He blinks around the apartment in the dim grey light, realizing that Armin isn’t here. Well, presumably he went to his bed. Jean flops his head back down on the couch cushion, waiting for consciousness to return to him. Armin’s couch smells a bit funny, like maybe a really faint mothball smell. Armin himself doesn’t smell that way . . . though Jean is pretty sure his own musk is damn offensive right now . . . maybe he shouldn’t be lounging here, letting it seep into the couch’s fabric.

His toe pulses.

“Fuck!”

He sits up carefully, the blanket sliding off of him and onto the floor. He grabs his phone from out of his pocket (the clock reads 6:47), hits the flashlight function, and inspects his injury.

His skin is a horrifying mixture of purple and red, but there’s no swelling, and after sitting still for five minutes, he realizes that it’s not in constant pain.

Jean lets out a sigh of relief. Not broken. No hospital trips for him. No distracting healthcare workers from more important things with his own stupidity. More important things that they are underpaid to accomplish, risking their own lives to do the best they can in a failing hospital system that had been designed to maximize profits . . .

He opens a browser tab on his phone and pulls up the New York Times. As he told Armin last night, he doesn’t necessarily read articles, but he occasionally scans the headlines, the ever-increasing numbers of people infected feeling increasingly surreal. And every day their great leader tries to play politics with people’s lives, choosing favorites amongst the governors to determine who will get life-saving equipment first . . . how could the wealthiest nation in the world be so, goddamn unprepared for a pandemic . . .

One of today’s news stories is that Congress passed a bipartisan bill that everyone under a certain income will receive a “stimulus check” of $1,200 per person and $500 per dependent child in a household. Jean thinks back to when he was last in a salaried job. $1,200 was about what he made in two weeks, and his rent ate up half that every month. They might be in lockdown for months, and this is supposed to cover necessities for all the people losing their jobs because of this crisis?

A familiar rage stirs in his gut. Old Jean used to care a lot about these systematic problems. Old Jean might have been doing a lot more to help out in this time of crisis. New Jean just yells like a cranky old man at bored, worried, quarantined people for cheering because they want to feel like they can control things that are so beyond their scopes.

Control.

Armin had talked about letting go of control last night, and it had freaked Jean the hell out. Right now, he feels like has no control over anything; not over this crisis, not over his spiraling life, not even over his fucking feelings.

His chest and back begin to ache again, the constant pain he can only ever dull but never really heal.

Having another emotional crisis in Armin’s living room in the wee hours of the morning does not seem like a good idea to Jean. He should go upstairs. And maybe shower, as if that could wash all of this off him.

Careful of his toe, he stands up. And, trying to be polite after the little tantrum he threw yesterday, he folds up the blanket and sets it on the back of the couch. He really doesn’t remember falling asleep while they were watching TV. He hopes Armin wasn’t offended.

As he’s collecting himself to leave, his eyes land on the book on Armin’s coffee table again. _Io After Galileo: A New View of Jupiter’s Volcanic Moon._ Jean thinks that maybe he learned sometime in school that moons could have volcanoes, but it still seems eerily Earth-like to him. How is that even possible?

He is still pondering that when, after hopping back upstairs to his own apartment, he’s standing under the spray of his shower. At around 7:00 AM no less, like a real adult. He’s washing his hair and trying to stoically ignore the sting of his toe, contemplating just how much he doesn’t know about this universe he inhabits. He’s always been a bit of a big picture person, looking at systems and how they impact people’s individual lives, but he’d never really wanted to think about the biggest system. The solar system. That was beyond his ability to understand or influence. But if what Armin says it’s true, it’s not always about influencing.

Jean still doesn’t like the passivity of that approach. But he also doesn’t like the feeling that he’s trapped in the middle of something beyond his comprehension . . . and maybe it isn’t entirely beyond on his comprehension anymore.

When he gets out of the shower, he goes immediately to his phone. He sees he has a message there from Armin.

_How’s the toe?_

No comment about Jean sneaking off. No comment about him falling asleep. Just concern.

Jean isn’t sure how to feel about that.

_not broken. sorry, this is random but can you teach me about space?_


	3. Io and Enceladus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: existential, self-destructive thoughts

“It’s called orbital resonance. Io orbits Jupiter, but it also resonates with Jupiter’s other moons Europa and Ganymede, who actually hold it in its orbit, and being pulled in two different directions creates friction, which we call tidal dissipation.”

“Okay. And what does that mean?”

Armin makes a circling gesture with his hands, perhaps to communicate something about Io’s orbit or the way the friction works or . . . fuck if Jean knows. He’s having a difficult time following any of this.

“Io has an internal heat source that comes from this friction, and that heat essentially generates the lava that explodes to the surface. But the volcanoes aren’t where we’d expect them to be based on the peculiarity of Io’s forced orbital eccentricity. They’re actually a little bit to the east, which might mean that they’ve migrated because there’s an ocean of molten rock under the surface.”

Jean takes a deep breath.

“I think we have to take two steps back. Volcanoes can migrate?”

Armin sighs.

“I’m sorry, I think I’m not always good at approaching this from a layman’s perspective. Maybe we can find a documentary.”

They’re sitting at Armin’s kitchen table, which is now littered with solar system maps and scrap papers covered in tiny little calculations. Staring at the incomprehensible formulas now, it’s disheartening to remember that they once took the same AP Calculus BC class together, way back in 2009.

God, a lot of time has passed.

“Is ‘layman’ scientist code for ‘idiot’?” Jean grumbles. He regrets it as soon as it leaves his mouth. His frustration is more with himself for being so dense than with Armin for not being able to explain it correctly.

Armin sits back in his chair and pinches the bridge of his nose. “No, it just means you’re a person who is very new to learning about space, and despite being a TA for intro to astronomy, I’m still bad at making things comprehensible to you. I’m sorry.”

Guilt drags on Jean. He’s activated some kind of insecurity in Armin because he couldn’t keep his own insecurities to himself.

He opens his mouth to apologize, but Armin gets there first.

“Sorry,” he repeats, still massaging his forehead. Jean remembers seeing him do that a couple times way back in the day. Probably in AP Calculus BC. “Things are really rough at the university right now. We’ve moved to remote teaching and I feel like I can’t get through to my students. Some just don’t respond, some just can’t focus anymore, and even though we’ve moved to a universal pass/fail for the semester, I still have students emailing me about their grades. So, I’m just, not feeling very good about my ability to teach right now.”

Jean reaches out automatically to pat Armin reassuringly on the arm. The other man looks a bit startled by the contact, but he doesn’t pull away. Then Jean realizes this is probably the first time in months, even before the COVID-19 crisis, that he’s taken initiative to touch another human being.

Weird.

He removes his hand.

“I’m a really impatient student who takes a lot of time and energy. You don’t have to push yourself so hard for me. Like, you have more important things to do.”

Armin blinks at him, then shoots him a tight smile. “I don’t give up so easily, especially when it comes to teaching people about the solar system. Let’s find a documentary. And, as a compromise, I’ll grade some problem sets while we watch.”

They move to the couch, find something by Nova about Jupiter and its moons, and settle in to watch and work. However, seeing Armin flicking through student tests on his laptop, blue-light glasses perched on the end of his button nose, makes Jean feel guilty for not working himself. He’s saved up enough money to get by a bit longer, but pretty soon he’s going to need to turn his attention to drawing his commissions. Not just for the cash, but to preserve his already mediocre reputation. He tries to shake off that feeling and concentrate on the computer rendered fantasies of Io’s volcanoes on the TV screen.

Some of the facts about Jupiter bounce off of Jean, but what does sink in is a bit startling to him. For all Armin’s rhapsodizing about the glorious arbitrariness of space, the astronomers in this piece seem to be describing how the solar system works in very human terms. All of the planets suddenly become a “family.” Jupiter is the “bully” of their system, holding court over tons of moons and essentially annexing the asteroid belt with his dense gravity. Io is pushed in two different directions, manipulated by forces beyond her control. At one point, Jean learns that the asteroid that hit Earth millions of years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs was flung at earth due to slipping out of Jupiter’s gravitational pull. The documentary’s narrator makes it sound like a wrathful whim rather than a coincidental result of the laws of existence, as Armin might put it.

This is comforting to Jean though; he understands this storytelling impulse. Of course, the universe only makes sense if it’s narrativized. After all, why else would the planets be named after the Roman pantheon, if not to generate new meanings with stories? Perhaps Armin’s careful abstraction is an anomaly within the field of astronomy.

The story itself, however, is not particularly pleasant. Jean doesn’t like the fact that he relates to Io, stuck between competing forces and unable to do anything except spew lava into her own atmosphere. He also is uncomfortable with how precarious Earth’s position is. Having an asteroid collide with their face seems relatively easy.

Would that be so bad though? They would all be wiped out at once, together, and at least then Jean wouldn’t be stuck in perpetual limbo, carrying his guilt around with him and unsure if he would ever be able to experience happiness again. And, unlike the virus currently decimating humanity, an asteroid would be quick and painless. Everything would just stop, all at once, with no possibility of a future.

But then, why does Jean feel like he’s already suffered through an asteroid crash, miraculously survived somehow, and is trying to make his lonely way through a post-apocalyptic world?

He pinches his forearm to interrupt these thoughts. There are people actually suffering out in the world right now, he doesn’t have to be such a baby about his self-inflicted troubles.

When the credits role, Armin finally looks up from his work.

“So, did that help make sense of it?”

“A bit,” Jean concedes. “Io is volcanic because of competing gravitational pressures of different moons and Jupiter, something, something.”

Armin nods, looking a bit relieved. “Basically.”

“Must suck,” Jean finds himself saying.

This causes Armin to frown in confusion at him. “What do you mean?”

“Like, she’s angry all the time and constantly erupting her innards into space, all because of these competing pressures.”

“‘She’?”

“Io was a she right? I don’t remember everything about Roman mythology.”

Armin sets his computer down on the table in front of him and pushes his glasses up into his hair. It makes a cute little headband.

“Bodies of matter in space don’t have feelings,” he says very seriously.

“Oh, come on!” Jean sputters. “Maybe they don’t, but I do! Just humor me a bit and let me project my humanity onto a hunk of molten space rock. Besides, your astronomer friends were doing just that all over the TV.”

“Oh, yeah. That happens sometimes.” Armin contemplates the now blank screen, biting his lip as he obviously mulls over what to say next. What’s going to happen? Is Jean going to get icy, logical Armin? Or enthusiastic, vulnerable-yet-strong-I-don’t-give-a-fuck-let-me-tell-you-about-my-trauma Armin?

“So,” he says, turning back to Jean. His hands--he seems to talk a lot with his hands--are out in front of him in straight, emphasizing lines. Logical Armin then. “Think about it this way. Yes, we could think about Io as someone helplessly struggling between two competing forces. Or, maybe we could free it from that, and just think about it as lunar mass that has no need for our puny human problems. I guess it probably just depends on which is most useful for us in any given situation.”

Jean takes a moment to churn this over in his mind before speaking again.

“Is the second option more helpful for you, most of the time?”

Another pause. Then a little non-committal head wiggle from Armin. Finally, he nods. “Yes, usually. I find that . . . comforting.”

Jean opens his mouth to vehemently state that he does not, but then he remembers that he’s here to try to understand Armin’s perspective on this space stuff. Still, he can’t let go of a challenge. 

“But you really love that TV show about all those gray people in space,” he reminds Armin, trying to modulate himself and match Armin logic for logic. “And that show sure does love metaphor. I mean, Mars, the planet named for the god of war, has the best military, the people in the asteroid belt are caught between competing forces, and they’re constantly talking about whose on one of the ‘inner’ planets and whose on the ‘outer’ ones.”

“Okay,” Armin nods. “That’s true, but those are all humans using planets to symbolize their problems and justify their visions of how human society works. I can enjoy watching other humans project onto the planets and still prefer to think about them as bodies shaped by coincidental but ultimately rule-abiding forces.”

He picks up his computer again and resituates his glasses at the end of his nose. Jean understands that this is a signal that Armin is done with this conversation. That annoys him. What makes Armin think he has the right to decide that, especially when he’s just said the adult, cold scientist version of “facts don’t care about your feelings”?

“Well, at least you admit they’re not mutually exclusive,” he grumbles, still trying to keep his own feelings in check. Venting doesn’t seem like a strategy that’s going to work well with Armin at this point. “So, you can continue thinking about Io as completely random, and I can continue thinking of Io as someone stuck in the shitty orbital resonant whatever.”

“Orbital resonance,” Armin mumbles without looking up. Then he shakes his head. “Also, if we’re relating to moons, orbital resonance isn’t always a bad thing . . . well, spewing lava isn’t actually a bad thing. Also, I never said anything was random! Coincidental is not random!”

Signs of life burst out of Armin, despite his obvious effort to remain detached. He shoots a frown over at Jean, who feels a weird visceral pleasure taking something of Armin’s and forcing him to see it in a different light, activating the emotions that Armin is trying to deny. That feeling is quickly outweighed by guilt, though; fuck, he’s not twelve.

So, he raises his hands in surrender. “I get what you mean about coincidence not being the same as randomness, I’m sorry. I also guess if you’re a big hunk of space rock, you probably don’t care about lava the way, say, I would care about being hit by lava. But now you have to explain to me what you originally meant about orbital resonance not always being a ‘bad thing.’” He glances at Armin’s glowing screen and amends, “When you have time.”

Armin follows his gaze and has the grace to look a bit sheepish. “I’m sorry about that. When I get focused I . . . well, it’s hard for me to let go. And it’s not a problem, it’s pretty simple to explain once you understand the basic principle of orbital resonance. So, Saturn has a moon called Enceladus.”

Jean nods along with this part of the explanation. He remembers seeing book titles about it when he first visited. 

“Well, because it’s in orbital resonance with Saturn’s other moon Dione, it heats up like Io. But instead of spewing lava, it emits geysers of water. This implies that there’s an active ocean under its layer of ice.”

Jean’s heart skips a beat. He thinks he can see where this is going, but he has to wait for Armin to continue to make sure he really understands.

“With active water comes the possibility of life. Enceladus is possibly the best candidate for life to originate outside of Earth in this solar system.”

“Woah.” Jean sits back in the coach cushion, his mind churning this over. Life. Life outside of Earth. “Do they . . . do you . . . have they run tests to find it?”

Armin shakes his head. “No, the most recent satellite we sent there, Cassini, had to be crashed into Saturn before we could get more data. But this moon is the most likely candidate we’ve ever seen. And not like, grey alien type life, we would know about that. But possibly some microscopic beings could be evolving there. We’ll eventually have to send another satellite to find out.”

This requires a few minutes of thought for Jean to process.

Life, off of Earth.

Aliens.

Just out there, evolving.

Naturally.

Weird.

“I see. So, you’re saying that orbital resonance can be a ‘good thing’ because in this case it created the conditions to activate life.”

Armin gives a shrug that is, perhaps, a bit too nonchalant. Jean gets the sneaking suspicion that he probably cares a lot about this moon and all of its possibilities. He’d had all those books on it, after all.

“I don’t know how that fits into your narratives about being ‘stuck,’ but without Dione, Enceladus would be just another ice moon. Which is also not a bad thing,” he adds quickly. “Ice moons are great.”

“But life is more interesting, even for you,” Jean asserts. Hesitating ever-so-slightly, Armin nods.

They lapse into silence while Jean let’s all of this information sink in. Why don’t people talk about this possibility for life outside Earth more? Shouldn’t they be taught this information more in school? Or maybe he’s giving this little moon more credit than he should. Maybe, since it’s just a possibility, people don’t want to get too excited about it yet. Or maybe they can’t? Saturn is very far away, and nothing that happens on Saturn effects Earth directly . . . or does it? Hadn’t that documentary on Jupiter talked about all the ways its gravitational pull managed their solar system? And certainly if Jupiter could hurl rocks at Earth, Saturn must be able to fuck shit up here too . . . but unless you cared about astrology and Saturn being in the twelfth house or something-something, even if Saturn somehow made life on Earth possible, it would be difficult for most humans to process. Hell, many Americans couldn’t process how they themselves were part of many political and economic systems that were now pressuring them to either stay at home and preserve public health or go back to work to feed themselves and their families. How could any of them, Jean included, really come to understand the significance of Jupiter or Saturn or those other giant planets way out there (Uranus? Another one?) on their own lives?

Armin stops tip-tapping away on his keyboard and glances over at Jean, almost shyly.

“Actually, how would you analyze Enceladus? If you were going to tell a story about it?”

The request surprises Jean after how annoying Armin had found his previous attempts to project human feelings onto space objects. Still, how can he not humor such a question after he's pushed it so hard? He thinks for moment, then answers, “I guess, if Io is an example of someone exploding because they’re being pulled in multiple directions but unable to act, Enceladus would be a more ideal type of relationship. Through being together, you create the possibility of life—”

His throat is closing up, his chest tightening. He does know, very acutely and precisely, that feeling of being pulled into someone special’s orbit, of activating parts of himself he didn’t know existed or didn’t understand until he met them. He remembers very well how joyful that sensation of being in creative harmony with someone is, and he craves it in the same way his body sometimes begs him for a cigarette.

Abruptly, he’s on his feet.

“Sorry,” he croaks. “You’re w-working, and I have to go. Go work, probably. I have a job, you know. Jobs.”

“I—”

But he doesn’t wait for Armin’s response. Before he knows it, he’s out the door, up the stairs, and pacing his room, his back aching in the familiar beginnings of a panic attack.

“Fuck Space!” he grunts, kicking his bedframe. He immediately regrets this, yowling with pain and clutching his already bruised toe. “You were supposed to be cold and unemotional,” he continues ranting at the cosmos, his vision blurring with tears. “You were supposed to help me detach . . . but I couldn’t . . . I c-can’t.”

He flops down on his bed. Nothing was supposed to be like this. Why had he let it come to this?

In a sudden frenzy of emotion, he pulls his phone out of his pocket. He opens the messenger chat, ignoring that the other person’s profile picture has changed to two people instead of one. He starts to type something out, something long-winded about how stuck he is, how he can’t get over their break-up, how he just needs one more chance, one more try . . . then he mashes the backspace. No, that’s not fair. You don’t get to say any of that if you’re the dumper, no matter your reasons for dumping. Next, he tries a different tack:

_I think I just have to take a break. We don’t talk that much anyway but I just need to find a way to stop thinking about you. I’m still pining for you, that’s not fair to you. I just can’t be your friend at all right now. Even casually, even with as little contact as we have these days. It’s impossible. I’m impossible._

He closes his eyes. His blood is pounding in his ears and his breath is coming in short gasps. This is anxiety-induced. He’s not rational, he shouldn’t do anything. He should let go and think about what he actually wants when his brain can handle it.

But he wants a hit. He needs to feel his ex’s attention, however fleeting and casual. He physically, desperately has to have just a tiny tug of orbital resonance.

_did you know that saturn has a moon that could support life? weird, right?_

Just as he’s sent this message, another one flashes across the top of his screen, this time from Armin.

_Are you okay?_

Jean holds his phone to his chest and lays back on his bed, staring at the blank white ceiling through tear-hazed eyes.

One time, back before the apocalypse, Marco had visited him here. They had laid on his bed like he was doing now, but naked and wrapped in each other's arms. They had laughed about ridiculous things, giddy and talking to each other in silly voices, and at one point Marco had pointed at his ceiling and cried, “Your light looks like a boob!”

And so it did. Jean had thought the same thing to himself before many times, but when Marco had said that with a beautiful grin on his perfect face, Jean had laughed so hard his sides hurt.

How many times had he looked at Marco and wondered, how could anyone ever be this perfect? No one else could smile like Marco, no one else could smell like Marco, no one else was going to fit so perfectly in his arms . . . why had he thrown it all away? What was the point of his existence if he was just going to screw up everything so terribly?

He imagines, as he has on so many nights this past few months, falling into a vat of acid and dissolving. Dissipating into the universe until his components can be used again in some other lifeform, one that wouldn’t be such a wasted failure. Or maybe, like Io, he could self-destruct from the inside, let the lava win. Anything other than continuing to exist, stagnant and trapped in locked-down NYC, miserably missing the person around whom he had once tried to order his life.

His phone pings again. It’s the sound of a text message, not Messenger. So, not Marco. As if Marco would care about Fun Astronomy Facts with Jean anyway. But if it’s not messenger, it’s probably another text from Armin.

Jean takes a deep breath and steals himself to look at the screen again.

_Please answer, even if it’s annoying._

He winces. Whatever Armin might say about wanting to spend time with Jean to assuage his own loneliness, Jean is sure that he has burdened his old classmate. Crazy Jean, upstairs. He gets upset by projecting his human emotions on space rocks. You never know what he’s going to do next to hurt himself or how you might have to intervene. Crazy Jean, throwing temper tantrums exactly like he used to in high school . . . no, he’s even more childish than when he was in high school, going through one hardship and letting it derail his life while Armin had conquered terrible situation after terrible situation to be on the verge of graduating from Colombia University with a doctorate in astronomy.

Well, Jean will burden no one anymore. He has to push himself to grow beyond this.

He’s just typing out a bland, reassuring answer to Armin when a new message appears.

_I lied earlier. Well, not lied exactly. But I project my feelings onto space too. All the time. Some days I want to be an ice planet out beyond Pluto, or a piece of intergalactic space debris. Or even a particle of light, something small and without feelings that doesn’t affect anyone else and isn’t affected by something else. But that’s impossible. We’re all part of a big system._

_Sorry . . . that’s too much. It’s too sappy. Just . . . don’t be too hard on yourself._

Without stopping to think, Jean follows his first impulse and hits the call button on his phone.

“I don’t want to burden to you,” he blurts without waiting for Armin to finish saying hello.

“I know,” Armin replies without missing a beat. “I hate to burden people too. I hate even more to be dependent.”

Jean nods. It’s a familiar feeling.

“Orbital resonance really sucks. But it’s unavoidable, like you say.” Jean pauses for a moment to compose himself, sniffling and breathing. Armin waits for him to continue, but it doesn’t feel like pressure. “Why do you say that you hate being dependent?”

“I’m adopted,” Armin replies, once again surprising Jean a bit with his straightforwardness. “I think, even in the best-case scenarios, an adopted person is going to wonder sometimes if they’re a burden to their new family or why their old one didn’t want them. And I did not grow up in the best-case adoption scenario. I had to meet my new parents’ expectations, my older siblings’ expectations, my church’s expectations, and I felt like I was constantly failing. Everything about me was wrong; my interests, my questions, my scrawny body, my sexuality.”

Jean files that last piece of information away. The fact that Armin might not be entirely straight does not surprise him, but Armin had finally felt comfortable confirming it, which he realizes is more than he’s done for Armin. But before he can say anything, Armin goes on.

“For the first twenty years of my life, I was so dependent on these people who didn’t want to know me and love me for who I was. And it’s very hard to pull away, once you’re dependent on people. Especially because we're often told that we must be grateful that anyone thinks of us at all. After I was finally free, I found it difficult to trust anyone but myself. It took me years and years to learn to open up to others.”

“You’d never know listening to you now,” Jean chuckles weakly, finally managing to sit up. “I’ve had the opposite arc. I used to think I was too open, but then I realized I wasn’t, and I couldn’t actually . . . I couldn’t open up when it really mattered. I thought when I left Trost I was going to constantly be getting better, but what I really found out is that I’m actually a giant mess.”

There’s a crackling on the other end as Armin lets out a sigh. “Well, you were always self-deprecating, that’s consistent. No one can only ever just be a mess. Maybe you’re just in a lot of pain right now. But it won’t be that way forever.”

Jean winces. “I really hate platitudes. The more I think about my life ahead of me the more I think that it’s not going to amount to anything, and I’m constantly going to be in pain. I mean, we’re in the midst of a pandemic. The whole world is partially shut down. The economy is going to crash. And we still haven’t dealt with global warming. I’m suffering on a personal level _and_ everything about the future in general looks bleak. Even if I stop feeling pain about . . . my personal shit . . . and even if the world gets better, I’ll feel pain again. Sometimes I don’t understand the point.”

Well, there it is. He can’t take those words back. They’re going to lie between them forever. Crazy upstairs Jean, depressed and on some kind of metaphorical ledge. He feels strangely relieved to have put all his thoughts out there though. Like stretching an old, underused muscle.

“Well, it’s kind of like space. Coincidences happen, but we make meaning out of them. It’s not like there’s a point already there that we’re trying to uncover, I think the only way life has a point is if and when we decide there is one.” Armin responds slowly, as if he’s being choosing his words carefully. But, Jean realizes as he listens, not so much because he’s guessing what Jean wants him to say, but because he’s searching for a way to express something that’s difficult. “I’m not trying to sell you self-help bullshit or anything, I don’t think you can change how you feel in the moment by trying to understand the point of something differently . . . just, pointlessness can be freeing.”

Freeing.

“I feel like I’ll never be free,” Jean admits, finally. “I don’t like the idea that something is completely pointless. Then why bother?”

“Maybe pointless isn’t the right word . . . you don’t have to suffer through something because you 'deserve' it. It took me a long time to realize that growing up. I didn’t ‘deserve’ my adopted family and I didn’t have to be grateful that anyone took me in at all.”

Jean shakes his head to ward off this line of reasoning. “I . . . I think I do deserve what I’m suffering. I think I left high school a stupid prick and here I am, all the way across the country, still a stupid prick.”

A long pause.

“Can I ask why?” Armin finally asks. “Like, will you tell me what you’re going through? Or is now not a good time to talk about it?”

The question is sincere, so Jean allows himself to sincerely consider. What would be best for him? What would make him feel best? He senses the story wants to come out; the more Armin talks about his past, the more Jean wants to share his own. Armin will know how to judge him . . . but maybe that will make him hate Jean? Should he take the catharsis of confession or the comfort of having someone he’s coming to respect more and more like him?

He sighs. It has to be confession. Every relationship has to be as honest as he can make it now. He owes Marco that much. And if Armin comes to hate him, it’s probably what he deserves.

“Can I come downstairs and tell you in person? Over the phone feels cold.”

“Of course.”

They hang up and Jean summons the strength to force himself out of bed. His whole body is shaking as he stumbled back out of his apartment. As he his trembling hand is turning the knob on the front door, his Messenger app pings. Unable to resist the lure of his drug, he looks at his phone.

_Woah! That’s weird! Space is kind of creepy._

_Btw, saw a dog today I thought you would appreciate._

It is indeed a very cute dog, and the sweetness of Marco thinking about him at all fills him for a brief moment, but it's quickly followed by a sting because this tiny conversation just barely scratches the surface of how they used to talk.

He forces himself to close the app and go downstairs.


	4. Direct Data, Entry Log 1

“So, first off, what you have to understand is that I’m queer. But that doesn’t mean that the rumor about Reiner sucking my dick in high school is true. I was too chicken to do anything about my gay feelings back then, and I’m not even sure I had words to express them in my head. I mean, you remember the 2000s. Post-9/11 conservative backlash galore. That’s so weird to think about now because when I ran off to college in 2010, it seemed like either the east coast truly was the liberal commie heaven our junior history teacher had warned us about or that suddenly gay rights had exploded into the mainstream. Probably a bit of both.

“And of course, the east coast isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either.

“But anyway, I think that rumor was started to hurt Reiner more than me. I mean, what would a golden boy like him be doing hanging out with the angry emo kid who didn’t stand for the pledge of allegiance? And he was the one who was supposedly doing the sucking.

“None of this is the point, I’m sorry. I’m just . . . stalling. The only important part is that I came to queerness a bit late and I guess I’m bi/pan, but I realized a couple years ago that I prefer men. Tada.

“I met Marco about three years ago, when I was between jobs and still deciding if I wanted to get my MFA. A few months before we started talking, I had zero fucking motivation to do anything, and I was kind of coasting by with my roommates’ help. I know, familiar story. I think this was right before Trump got elected too, and when that happened it kind of felt like the world was ending. So, again, familiar story.

“It was at this point that I started to become obsessed with webcomics, maybe out of escapism, I don’t know. In college I had studied art, but definitely from a more traditional angle; painting, mostly, if you can believe it. But when I was in high school, you probably don’t remember, I used to doodle characters all the time. Reading all those self-published comics at a time when I wasn’t sure who I was anymore made me feel like, maybe I ought to try this, to come back to this old skill. So, I did that, at the end of 2016. My stuff wasn’t very good, and I didn’t get a lot of hits, but once I started, I just couldn’t stop. By the time I found Marco’s comics in like early 2017, I was the most productive I’d ever been in my life.

“Which is not to say that the quality of my work improved. But I was building up a tiny following. Honestly, I didn’t care so much about that because it was more important to be to just . . . put this shit out there, you know? Express myself, or some shit like that. Marco’s work however . . . moved me. It was the weirdest feeling I’ve ever had. Remember, I had read TONS of webcomics by that point, regardless of genre or quality, but when I saw Marco’s expressive and dynamic characters and detailed worlds, I was kind of blown away. And you know, I’ve read published work before; I’ve seen ‘great art,’ whatever that means. I have loved art before. Marco’s stuff made me want to talk to him, to know the person behind these creations. Nothing else ever has.

“Turns out I’m not the only one who felt that way about him. That’s how he meets most of his friends. He’s prolific. Beyond prolific. And not just webcomics either—novels, video essays, radio shows, illustrations, plays, poetry, drag shows, academic essays, voice acting, singing—if there’s a way to express yourself, Marco has done it, or will do it in the future. I know what you’re thinking. Does this person exist? Yes, and I’m constantly amazed and . . . proud of him. Even at my peak productiveness, I could only produce a quarter of what he did, and I was hardly ever at that peak.

“Anyway, even before we started talking, even before I saw his face, I looked at his artwork and I thought, ‘I wonder if this guy is single?’ Who does that? I’m telling you though, this is absolutely true, not my projecting feelings that I had later back on an older version of myself. I read all of his stuff that I could find under that particular username, and I even tried to read some of his fanfiction that he had written. In Italian, because Marco is Italian. I don’t read Italian, I had to use google translate, which means that whatever I got was like through a mirror darkly, or whatever, but I still loved it. His webcomics were mostly in English though, at least the ones I knew about then, and I would re-read at least one or two of them a day for several weeks.

“I think I knew I could love him because he often wrote about romance between men. Everything he depicted was stuff I had always wanted—close partners working together, talking through their problems together, confronting hard shit at each other’s sides. I started try to write some of that into my stories. I had been out for a while by that point, but you know how it is to be a queer man. There are expectations, formulas. I wanted something more personal and human. And that’s what I tried giving my characters.

“But I really just wanted it for myself. Whatever I drew, I drew it for myself, about myself, no matter who the characters were. And my comics started to look a lot like my personal aspirations.

“That’s when Marco reached out to me. He had read my comics. I guess I had spent too much time favoriting all his shit and so he thought he would check my work out. Even weirder, he said he actually liked them! I was floored. And then, after talking for a bit, he asked if I would be willing to edit the English for his webcomics, just to make sure it was all correct. He had remarkable English, but I agreed. It was an opportunity to finally talk to him.

“It felt like fate. God, that sounds so stupid, but it’s what I really thought at the time. We talked so much and so openly and found out we had a lot in common. It got to the point where he would be the first person I texted in the morning and I would be the last that he would text at night. No subject was left undiscussed. Eventually we started sending each other pictures of our lives. I talked to him about my insecurities about applying for an MFA, the work it was going to ask of me. He told me about his life as an artist in Italy, the problems he’d had with his family growing up. We discussed grad school since he had two masters degrees—yes two!—and was starting his PhD on Italian comics and fan studies. It sounds like a romcom or something ridiculous, doesn’t it?

“Except he already had a partner.

“I think I haven’t changed so much since high school in some ways. I’m still a grumpy motherfucker, and though it had gotten better in college, my ego took a hit after I flopped after graduation, and I felt like I was still keeping myself apart from people, acting like a loner because . . . I dunno. It feels safest, easiest. I’m always on the move, I’m afraid of being stuck. I’d wanted to leave Trost so badly, and I wanted to get out of Maryland by that point and move to the city. The fact that I opened up that quickly, and that I’d found someone I connected with so much . . . it felt like a miracle. And, at the time, I cherished that, even though I was sometimes sad about him being with another person. His partner seemed nice, I met him a few times when we Skyped, and I didn’t want to be in the way. It was enough to be close to Marco.

“Until he told me he liked me.

“. . .

“I think I still have the text messages where it happened saved somewhere, because I’m a creepyass motherfucker and I gotta carry my baggage with me all the time. I know Marco has deleted a bunch of our photos and things, I watched him do it to help him let go, but I haven’t been able to yet.

“. . .

“Shit, sorry.

“. . .

“A-anyway, he’d dropped a few hints that he might be polyamorous, but I, against my nature, held myself back from asking about it. Because . . . I guess I just didn’t want to ruin what we had, at the time. Maybe, if he had never told me that he liked me, we could have continued on the way we were, and maybe I’d be better off . . . but sometimes, it really seems like it was. . .

“Inevitable.

“I know you prefer to see the world as a random series of coincidences. And you know, before this, I was not a man who believed in fate. But the story . . . it was such a good story . . .

“And, I’d never tried poly before, but at the time it seemed worth it, if I could be with Marco. I read up a ton about it, we talked about it with his other partner. I was just so happy to actually f-fucking like, be . . . in love, to know all the stupid s-sappy feelings that came along with that.

“. . .

“Obviously, the next step was to make plans to see each other. To not burden his other partner, he decided to come visit me first. I was . . . not nervous at all, to be honest. It was love. Deep, deep love.

“ . . .

“I sound pretty gay talking like this, right? Ha.

“Anyway, I started to tell people about Marco, obviously. My best friend Sasha had suspected something for a long time and even encouraged me to just fly to Italy and see what could happen. For a while, I hadn’t been able to shut up about Marco to my every acquaintance. But something like, changed once we actually became a real couple, or whatever. Even though I had progressive friends I . . . I worried about what they would say about me being in a poly relationship with a foreigner I had met on the internet. I know Marco went through similar shit, had people question him about me too, but he didn’t seem to care as much I did. It was love.

“. . . I really wish I hadn’t cared as much. I wish I had just let myself be happy.

“. . .

“This is weird to talk about, isn’t it? Aren’t you tired? It’s pretty late. You’re sure? Okay.

“Uh, thanks. By the way. It’s so . . . weird to talk so much about all this. To someone new. But thanks for, uh, hearing me.

“Well, I met Marco and he smelled good and the sex was amazing and I felt like I’d . . . finally realized that love was possible. Up until we started talking, I wasn’t sure. I always want attachments, but like . . . I know I’m hard to deal with. And I hate to be rejected. I wasn’t so afraid of that happening with Marco though, for some reason. I trusted him . . . at least I thought I did. But I didn’t trust others. I tried to though . . .

“ . . .

“What I’m talking around is that I tried to tell my mom about me and Marco and it did not go well. And the fact that it did not go well did not go well with Marco.

“ . . .

“Did you ever meet my mom? No, that’s what I thought. I know I met Carla Yeager once at some kind of school bake sale. She seemed sad. My mom is . . . tough. She grew up in a hard household and she’s had to prove she deserves to exist her whole life. And I think when dad left us, she put a lot of pressure on herself to make a better life for me than she could ever have. But that sometimes made her jealous of me when I actually succeeded . . . humans are weird, right? I’m telling you all of this though because, at the time I started dating Marco, I was waffling about applying to art school, something my mom was really pushing me to do. She wanted me to make the most of my opportunities. She also knew I was depressed, and she thought . . . well, she thought that me spending my time with foreigner who already had another partner was a sign that I was going to give up on my life.

“And . . . some part of me thought she was right . . . because I had a stupid insecurity about my life. I was supposed to escape Trost. I was supposed to lead a better life than her, than everyone in our little school district because I’m so enlightened. Neoliberal bullshit, you know, but it’s hard to let go . . . and, because I’m afraid of being stuck, I was also afraid of being stuck with Marco if it wasn’t ‘right.’

“. . . I don’t blame you if you’re confused. I still can’t understand everything I did or felt.

“Marco was really upset by my mom’s reaction and like, the weight I gave it. I excused a lot of stuff she said because I thought it was a sign that she just cared about me. . . which made Marco think I was a bit of a fake when it came to my values. How could I say I was ready to rebel against our governmental systems while propping up the system of the nuclear family? Marco has a shitty family—an especially shitty dad. He thinks blood family should mean nothing unless they behave in ways that earn mutual respect, and I, technically, agree with him. But relationships are complicated, right? And, deep down, I thought I owed my mom for sacrificing so much to take care of me.

“Maybe you can understand that.

“. . .

“But Marco hated it when I said it. And I worried that Marco was trying to separate me from my support system for some reason, even though I think I was keeping him out of my life more than he was trying to take me away from it. When I think back now on how I behaved . . . fuck, I just wish I could have done everything differently. That I could have just . . . gotten over my stupid fears earlier, been firmer with my mom and stood up for me and Marco and just . . . not have let things escalate. I’m supposed to be honest, how could I . . .

“. . .

“Recently, I’ve started to think . . . that maybe _I_ wanted Marco to take me out of my life. Whenever I . . . reminisce about us, I always think about the times when we were in Italy together and almost never about the times he came to visit me in America, because those were usually more tense. He didn’t really like it here, not until I came to the city anyway. But I also felt like . . . letting go of my old life completely, that was an insecure thing to do. I couldn’t just tie my fate up with one person . . . but I wanted to. I think . . . in a lot of ways . . . Marco is someone who I want to _be_ . . . the ideal person. Even though there are times when I was mad at him or things that annoyed me about him . . . I’m still struggling not to think of him as perfect. But for all my grand plans for escaping my old life in Trost, I just . . . couldn’t. I needed to be secure.

“I guess . . . sometimes Marco didn’t make me feel very secure. Not necessarily because he wasn’t trying to but because . . . well, I guess, because I am bad at feeling secure. I’m suspicious.

“For example, when Marco first came to visit me, his other partner called one day to say they were interested in someone else along with Marco. I was, for a moment, terrified. Because I didn’t want to see Marco get upset trying to manage his insecurities about his other partner. But instead, Marco told me, ‘I think I love you more.’

“That scared me even more. I mean, I was also kind of elated, because it felt true to our bond right then. But as soon as he said it to me, I imagined him saying it to someone else eventually down the line.

“. . .

“. . .

“I guess love is risk. I just, hate to hurt.

“Well, who doesn’t? God, I’m such a whiny baby.

“Eventually Marco and his other partner did break up, just a few months later, after I spent part of the summer in Italy with Marco. Rome, to be precise. Things began to feel a bit like a fairy tale again. Marco told me that he thought he wasn’t really poly, that maybe we could be enough for each other because being poly was hard. I felt . . . relieved, I hate to say. I was so enamored . . . but then it became even more of a problem that I was really stuck in my American life, and that my mom was still very suspicious of my relationship. And also that I felt like I owed her time. Marco got me through the phone screen for hours every day, but that’s not the same as making sure he got priority visits . . . and I didn’t do that. Because I was trying to ‘balance’ things in my head.

“I also did apply to NYU for an MFA and I did get in. Marco supported me in that, even though he sometimes told me that I might just be doing it to make my mom happy by living out her dreams for me. But he did support me when I told him it was what I wanted . . . though it felt like it was another tie here when I could be trying harder to get to Italy. And I never did properly learn Italian. He began to feel that I wasn’t committing myself to him, that I was holding myself back. And, honestly, I was.

“I . . . I’m not ready to talk about exactly what happened between us last summer. I behaved . . . so badly. I lied to both Marco and my mom about summer plans, then I prioritized my mom and made Marco feel like my secret shameful whore. My mom had an opportunity to meet him and refused to do so. She didn’t want to talk to Marco, she found him pushy and . . . she felt like even when I was with her, he was taking up a lot my time with messages. Also, sometimes Marco and I would fight . . . and always I felt judged when we would, because both my mom and the friends I would tell thought it was a ‘bad sign.’

“. . .

“. . .

“But I felt like I expressed myself to Marco the most. And I sometimes thought . . . that I wished I could just make Marco my whole life . . . because that was the life I had chosen . . . even when it was hard . . . but it was scary, being pulled in two different directions, like I couldn’t live with a foot in both worlds . . . but maybe I made it that way for myself. Maybe I opposed my life in America and my mom to Marco . . . and maybe I wanted to. God, I don’t know.

“Well, my guilt got to me that summer. I decided Marco would be better off without me, as stuck as I was—and remember, I hate being stuck. So, I dumped him, for the first time.

“. . .

“God, sorry. Just give me . . . g-give me a minute.

“. . .

“. . .

“That . . . didn’t last. He contacted me again, told me he was upset but that he still loved me and wanted me. And fuck, I wanted him and loved him too . . . but, after everything that went down between us that July, I also felt guilty about being back together with him, that my friends and my mom would judge me for that . . .

“Haha, I bet you’re wondering why someone like me, who pretended to be a punk in high school, would care what others thought about him. I’m supposed to always speak my mind, right? The truth is, I’m just an insecure dipshit. I can’t live up to my principles. I’m a fake, okay?

“. . . don’t give me that look, it’s true.

“So, I didn’t fix the problem. I didn’t let Marco into my life more or prioritize him. And then . . . well, and then he fell in love with someone else. Another American from the opposite side of the country who he met through a series of videos he was making.

“He wanted to be poly again. I didn’t. I felt guilty about that, on top of my other guilt. He started the relationship anyway, even though I wasn’t sure what I could handle. And he didn’t communicate well with me about it, I think. Maybe I was hard to communicate with though. I just . . . I just kept thinking about ‘I love you more.’ Eventually, he did end this other relationship because it was ‘hurting me too much.’ That just added even more to my guilt. Being with me was forcing him to deny parts of himself. To compromise himself, which he hates. He said I had to let him choose, and he chose me.

“. . . I didn’t choose him.

“I was supposed to come visit him after Christmas. I insisted on visiting my mom for the holiday, like I always did. That upset Marco, because he blamed my mom more than me for what I had done to him over the summer, but he said as long as I came back to him . . . I didn’t though. I broke up with him again. I just . . . couldn’t face the fact that I had lied to my mom again—it forces her hand, see? God, when did I become such a coward? I’m not supposed to lie; I’m supposed to tell the ‘hard truth,’ be direct. But I’m actually a fraud. And I’d be lying again if I said that the idea that I’d sacrifice whatever with my mom for someone who might leave me . . .

“You see, the thing about Marco, is that he finds everyone interesting. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s really poly, he can find something to love in most people, he can connect with most people, and I want to feel like that’s a beautiful thing . . .

“God . . .

“Fuck.

“. . .

“. . .

“. . .

“I-I’m okay.

“. . .

“. . .

“No, I’m not. I’m hella fucking guilty. For abandoning Marco. For not accepting him as himself. I . . . I still love him. I can’t stop loving him. B-but I want him to be with me on my terms. That’s . . . that’s not f-fair. I also shouldn’t blame him or his polyness at all . . . I was just insecure and I chose my old life over my new life.

“I f-failed to become an adult.

“. . .

“. . . after it was over, I begged to come back. He thought about it . . . but then he said we had to break the c-cycle. He couldn’t constantly feel like I was going to a-abandon him. I guess that fear is something we, ah, had in common. Except his fear was more f-founded than mine . . .

“He wanted us to be fr-friends. I said no at first, because . . . I can’t stop. I can’t stop thinking about him as . . . mine. Which is possessive and awful. He’s my lover. He’ll only be a lover to me in my mind, I c-can’t . . . I can’t adjust to being his friend. But I also just couldn’t stop talking to him, even though we don’t talk as much anymore . . . I hope . . . I hate that I hope. Especially because I don’t deserve any second chances . . . third chances . . . I had my chance . . . I threw him away, like garbage. How can I go around talking about how much I love him and how perfect he is when I just . . . toss him out when he’s inconvenient to me?

“. . .

“. . . yeah.

“So.

“So, we talk sometimes. And it hurts, but I feel like I need it. Even though I know . . . I know he’s seeing some else. An old friend of his, Tomas. I’ve met him in person, he seems nice. I don’t like . . . know-know, but I know. And I want . . . I want to be able to wish Marco happiness . . . I want to be noble and good and happy that my love is in love . . . and I don’t even care about the sex or whatever, that’s not how my jealousy goes . . . I just want . . . his love. Which, I guess, I have. His ‘friend love.’

“. . .

“To be honest, sometimes it makes me really angry, even though I have no right to be. These days wh-when we talk there’s a wall. And I can’t get in. When he f-finally said no, he couldn’t do this anymore with me . . . I just felt like . . . closed out. And then he still wants to talk to me, I still matter to him . . . but not the way I want to. Not the way I still need. Someone else . . . someone else does now. And Marco . . . he loves deeply. If he’s with someone else he really loves them and he looks at them and he smiles at them . . . in the ways he used to look and smile at me . . .

“. . . God.

“. . .

“. . .

“. . .

“So, you see, I’m pathetic. I’m trash. I’m hung up on a man I consistently pushed away even when he offered me love who wants to be in relationship configurations that I can’t even handle. I . . . d-don’t think I’ll ever l-love again, Armin. I’m really, horribly stuck. I hate to be stuck . . . and now we’re stuck inside, quarantined, and I . . . just . . . don’t see the point. I guess I should get better . . . but it doesn’t matter anymore.

“. . .

“. . .

“I g-guess I sh-should be gr-grateful I-I ever . . . I ever . . . got the chance to experience love. But instead I’m so, so angry at the universe for ever allowing us to m-meet. And at myself, for f-failing.”


	5. The Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CW: Mention of self-slapping habit

Jean wakes up at some point late in the night, but it’s a half-waking. He opens his eyes briefly and takes a moment to register that he’s not in his own bed. The pillow smells and feels different and the blanket is heavier than he remembers. Behind him, there’s a warm presence, and he hears a slow, gentle breathing. But his brain isn’t ready to process any of this information, and so his eyes fall closed again as he drops once more into a pit of dreamless sleep.

When he next comes to, light is streaming through strange blinds in a strange room. But the sound of the garbage truck (an essential service) is still familiar. Wait, did he put his trash out this week? Probably not, shit. He glances around blearily, his early morning brain putting two and two together.

This must be Armin’s bedroom.

Upstairs, Jean doesn’t have a separate bedroom, his apartment is all one space. Down here, there’s apparently enough room to fit a separate place for sleeping. It’s very cramped, however, with barely any space to get into either side of Armin’s full bed. And there’s not much decoration either. Just a small chest of drawers and a clothes rack for Armin’s button ups, a side table on the other side with an alarm clock. And a few more books, though they don’t look like they’re about the cosmos, even from this distance. That, in itself, is curious. But Jean is afraid to scooch over and get a closer look. It feels a bit like snooping. Which, quite honestly, is something he always likes to do, but he doesn’t think he’s in Armin’s inner sanctum because he was specially invited. He thinks he’s here because there wasn’t anywhere else for him to go.

He flops back down on the bed. He’s relieved that Armin isn’t in the room so he can take a moment to compose himself before talking. Or, apologizing. Imagine being so exhausted after crying your eyes out to someone who was basically still a stranger to you that they took pity on you invited you to stay the night instead of trek back up the two flights of stairs to your own place? And then, because you were lonely and sad and everything is weird in quarantine, they let you sleep next to them in their bed? How on earth does he respond to this?

Jean vaguely remembers Armin trying to ask him some questions after he essentially confessed the depths of his soul, but he was so drained just from explaining it all that he couldn’t really give straight answers. That’s when Armin had suggested they go to sleep.

“When am I ever going to become an adult?” he mumbles into the pillow, his head starting to ache. His eyes still itch from all the tears he shed.

The sounds of the garbage truck fade away down the street, and Jean can suddenly hear a new noise from within the apartment. Armin’s voice, talking softly, just barely audible through the cracked door.

“. . . following regulations? Oh . . . yeah. Wow. I see.”

A shuffling accompanies his words, as if he’s pacing back and forth in the room beyond the door.

“I know, he’s threatened to withhold PPE and ventilators from everyone who disagrees with him. That’s terrifying.”

Oh, Armin is talking about dear leader Trump with someone. Jean considers getting up to avoid the awkwardness of having Armin find him still in his bed, but at the same time, he doesn’t want to interrupt a private conversation.

“I know you’re always as careful as you can be, but this . . . this is scary. I can’t even imagine . . . all the blood. No, no. We’re fine. Well, no, New York isn’t fine, obviously, we have the highest number of cases and deaths in the country . . . I know Cuomo is trying. How is Little doing?”

Little? Jean is curious who Armin is talking to, in spite of himself. He’s spent so much time working through his angst with this other man and talking about their pasts, he hasn’t really learned much about Armin’s life in the present. Except that, by his own admission, he’s lonely. Yet, he has people to call. Jean does too, he supposes, but he, well, doesn’t follow through. He just storms downstairs and bangs on Armin’s door.

“‘We’ just means New York. I’m fine, I’m just teaching from home and putting the finishing touches on my dissertation. Smith thinks I can still defend in June, and Reiss hasn’t withdrawn their offer, which is a miracle . . .”

Jean starts to feel uncomfortable with his eavesdropping. Reiss is the name of a prestigious university in Colorado, near Boulder, he thinks. If Armin is talking about finishing his dissertation and an offer from Reiss University, that probably means he’s about to go start his life as a new professor back west this summer.

The realization compounds Jean’s sadness.

Well, it’s probably for the best. He’s taken up enough of Armin’s time and energy for like, what? A month and a half? He’ll have to learn to manage himself.

He eases out of the bed, trying to make as little noise as possible. Outside the room, Armin’s voice continues to fade in and out as he stalks the short length of his apartment.

“. . . enough about me, I’m worried about you.”

Jean closes his eyes against the sudden wave of dizziness he experiences when he stands up. He looks down at the floor to try to regain his balance and realizes he slept in his clothes. Classy. Once he feels stable, he gathers himself and pads to the door, wondering how best to announce his presence without interrupting.

“Not just your health. Psychologically. This is a strain on all of us, least of all . . .”

Whoever Armin is talking to—and Jean begins to wonder more and more—it doesn’t sound like he should bother them. He feels his pocket for his phone, thinking to distract himself, but it’s not there. That makes him panic a little, and he glances around the room, wondering where he might have put it, he knows he brought it down here last night . . . what if Marco has sent him messages or . . .

He squeezes around the other side of the bed, glancing at the top of the dresser (just some old mail and papers), and then the nightstand. His phone isn’t there, but he sees the books more clearly. They are novels, and ones that aren’t about space or even the future, from the looks of them. Just modern titles by authors that Jean doesn’t recognize. And tucked into the corner, obscured by the nightstand, a stack of unfolded cardboard boxes.

Jean glances at the blank walls, seeing them anew and wondering. He’d assumed that Armin had no decorating taste, but maybe he was just packing and transferring things into storage before uprooting to the other side of the country. Maybe the reason he only had space books out was because he needed them to finish his work.

It shouldn’t bother him, if this is the case, that Armin has never mentioned anything about moving to him. But it does. Then again, Jean had not exactly revealed anything about himself until last night either.

On the other hand, Armin talked so openly about his past with the Yeagers, just letting truly horrendous things slip out. What was holding him back from talking about who he was _now_?

“No, I don’t want to call them.”

Armin’s voice is louder, firmer. It startles Jean, who whips around to stare at the door.

“I don’t care how they are. Mikasa, please. Don’t guilt me about this, not today. And don’t push yourself to worry about them too.”

Jean closes his eyes, a weird relief running through him. Mikasa, Armin’s adopted sister.

He remembers her pretty vividly. He’d had a bit of a crush on her back in the day, mostly because of her beautiful black hair and her cold way of staring. He had taken that stare for indifference as a teen, and it made her seem powerful. That’s why he had been so confused by the way she followed Eren around and defended him in all the fights he picked. Something else clicks into place; Armin had mentioned Mikasa was a nurse and that she had moved to Boise, Idaho, not too far from where they’d all grown up.

His stomach twists. Nurses are the front lines of this pandemic.

“Okay . . . thank you. Please be safe. Take care.”

Jean is out the door before he can second guess himself. All he knows is that he has to apologize, and he doesn’t want Armin to come to him.

“Look, I’m sorry for listening in, but I was awake, and I didn’t want to interrupt and also I feel like a total ass now for dumping all of my problems on you last night. I’ll go now.”

Armin puts out a hand to stop Jean. He’s still in flannel pajama bottoms and his hair in an unbrushed mess of sleep. He looks unbelievably tired.

“No, please stay. I’d prefer to have someone around.”

Jean swallows then nods. He can do that for Armin. If he’s really sure.

“Is she . . . I mean . . . what’s it like? Sorry, that’s morbid just—”

Armin cuts him off with a weary wave of his hand. “She just got off the night shift and she’s going home to rest.” He sighs, rubbing his forehead. “As for what it’s like, she just says there’s a lot of blood when a patient is in real bad shape. That’s all she’ll tell me really. Otherwise she says she’s as fine as she can be, which is to say not fine at all but not infected yet.”

Without stopping to think, Jean reaches out and pats Armin on the shoulder. The touch feels exploitative though, as if he’s allowed this kind of intimacy because of his confessions last night, even though Armin is still holding him at a bit of distance. So, he lets his hand fall to his side, clears his throat and mumbles, “Boise isn’t NYC.” 

As if that means anything when his friend is apparently working in an ICU.

Still, Armin nods.

“I do feel pretty useless,” he says abruptly, hugging his arms around himself. “Not that I ever wanted to be a doctor, just nothing I’m doing feels particularly meaningful right now.”

Jean tries to smile. “Well, you’re a teacher. That’s important. You give the college kids some stability, even if they don’t always give you the same.”

Armin lets out a soft, “ha.” Then a weird silence falls between them.

There’s no good place to start talking, but Jean can’t go on pretending that he never told his story. However, he’s also too exhausted to go over the details of it again right now and, weirdly, focusing on Armin feels better than thinking about himself.

“Do you . . . do you call her often?” He remembers Armin mentioning her when they first met, but it he had made it seem like a casual contact. The conversation Jean had just overheard had felt intense.

“More now than I use to, because of the crisis,” Armin admits. “Otherwise maybe once a month, and only if she won’t try to get me to call Grisha and Carla. Which usually she doesn’t . . . but this virus pulls people back together whether they want it or not.”

Jean understands this. A couple months ago, close to the beginning of the break-up, he had thought a few times about cutting off contact with Marco. As the weeks slipped by and the global crisis intensified, particularly in Italy, he had found it easy to justify is need for connection with Marco by telling himself he should make sure his ex was okay.

“Um, do you want some breakfast?” Armin glances back towards his kitchen, obviously distracted.

“Sure,” Jean says, because there’s not anything else much to say.

They eat bowls of corn flakes and drink tea and instant coffee. Jean doesn’t really notice the taste this time. He’s too focused on figuring out where to begin. He knocks back the last dregs of his drink and finally manages, “Um, thanks for, uh . . . letting me stay last night. And listening.”

Maybe it’s the breakfast or the morning sun suddenly spilling through the windows, but Armin seems instantly more awake. He focuses intently on Jean, but the effect is softened by the fact that it’s difficult to see him in all this light.

“You have . . . quite a story,” he finally answers. “You don’t have to thank me, I wanted to hear it. I have some questions, also, but maybe those will be annoying.”

Jean considers. “I can try. I owe you that.”

“You don’t,” Armin contradicts him firmly. “You don’t owe me anything. It’s a human need to tell your story, and as a friend, I’m here to listen.”

Friend. Friend? It seems too soon to call each other friends. But then, Jean has laid bare his soul to Armin. His eyes drift around the blank apartment as he searches for an answer.

“Okay. I will try.” He hesitates. “And in return, will you tell me your story? Not the ones about the past, but like . . . who you are now?”

The question made more sense in his head. He kind of does know who Armin is now; a space nerd who likes TV political dramas about space and educating people about space. A shrewd observer of people around him. An honest person not afraid to call out the people who had power over him in the past. A leftist. A teacher. A survivor. Queer.

But there’s still so much more he could know.

Armin’s strong brows are knitted in confusion. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean. But I can try too.”

“Okay.” Jean holds his hand out and Armin shakes it. “Deal.”

“My first question,” Armin immediately begins. “Is why do you take all the blame for what happened on yourself alone?”

Hearing him say those words out loud is like a bracing slap in the face. And Jean knows a thing or two about those, considering the habit he’s developed to cope with his pain and frustration.

“I . . . I made a mistake. Tons of mistakes. I have to take responsibility for that.”

“That’s true,” Armin says, turning to face him and leaning his elbow on the back of his chair. He looks too casual for the conversation they’re having. Surreal. “But even in the version of your story you just told me where you take the blame for everything, I can see many places where others made mistakes too. Your mom exerted a lot of pressure on you and didn’t accept you when you were happy. It also doesn’t sound like Marco was as open as he could have been about the other person he was in love with, that maybe he didn’t fully wait for your consent and talk things through with you? And then there are some things which don’t seem like anyone’s fault. It sounds like you and Marco have different relationship needs.”

“I’ve thought about all this,” Jean snaps, suddenly annoyed. How does Armin get to the heart of his interior conversations so quickly? “But I can only control myself and my own behavior.”

“Okay,” Armin replies, still unshakably calm. “I can see that, I guess. But you seem like you’re just flagellating yourself about it.”

“What?”

Armin mimes flogging his back. Jean frowns.

“I know what ‘flagellating’ means. I just don’t see what the problem is.”

There’s a pause while Armin chooses his words. “You are using everything that happened to punish yourself. It’s one thing to take agency to try to become the person you want to be and to make plans to do better next time. It’s another thing to just . . .” his hands flutter as he tries to find the right word. “Hate yourself.”

“But I am hate-worthy!” Jean insists, desperate to get Armin to see. “I hurt others and ruined my whole life!”

“You didn’t,” Armin counters. “A very important relationship ended very badly. You messed up, but other people did too, to varying degrees.”

Jean opens his mouth to yell something, meets Armin’s steady gaze, and then deflates, putting his head in his hands on the table. “You don’t understand.”

“That’s presumptuous.”

“It’s presumptuous of you to think you know me!” Jean retorts. “Or to understand my relationship with Marco! He was everything to me. When someone is everything to you, you don’t just . . . fail. You find a way to make things work. You work on yourself.”

Armin is rubbing his forehead. Jean feels equal parts mutinous and guilty. On the one hand, Armin has been incredibly kind to him and is trying to help him. On the other, some part of Jean wants to be left alone to hate himself in peace.

“Sometimes there are things you can’t solve on your own. It feels nice to have the control and the agency to lay blame or yourself or that you alone can fix a problem, but maybe there were a lot of things about both of your relationships here that were not yours to fix. I wasn’t in your relationships, so maybe I don’t know, but that’s how it seemed to me from the details you gave me.”

Jean opens his mouth to snap again, but then he closes it and reconsiders. Hearing Armin say these things to him is painful. He considers retreating, but then, he has come this far. “I feel like . . . I’m not explaining things to you properly if you don’t see how it’s all my fault. I feel like maybe I’ve given you the wrong impression of Marco, and maybe a bit about my mom too.”

“Like . . . you don’t want to be a victim?” Armin offers. Jean looks up at him and sees a hint of recognition in his expression.

“Did you . . . not want to be a victim either?” he asks, thinking of Armin’s cultish past.

Armin smiles tightly.

“Of course not. It sucks. It makes you feel weak and powerless.”

“But you like to think about things as beyond your control?” Jean pushes, trying to make sense of Armin’s life philosophies.

“That’s my coping mechanism. There are some things I have power and control over. There are some things that I don’t.”

Jean considers Armin. His chin is sticking out again. He’s going to stand his ground on this.

“I’m betting that you don’t so much struggle with the ‘everything is my fault’ route as much as the ‘everything is in my control’ route,” Jean says finally. “I think I used to be more that way too . . . and then I kept failing . . . and failing . . . and failing . . .” He sighs and puts his head down on the table.

After a moment, he feels a hand lightly on his back.

“Can you . . . try seeing how some things are not your fault?”

Jean shakes his head slightly without looking up. “I’ve tried to blame my mom. I feel like that doesn’t get me anywhere though because she won’t take responsibility for anything. She always turns it back on Marco or me. And the poly stuff wasn’t what split Marco and me up . . . he was going to ‘choose’ me, however guilty I felt about that. It was how pressured I felt to be with my mom and how I made Marco feel like a dirty secret . . . but my anger . . . I find it so hard to be angry at her or Marco. Either option feels like some kind of betrayal, like I’m buying the other person’s version of the truth. Even though I know my mom pushed me . . . but I should have stood up to her! If I had just . . . explained . . . myself better . . . maybe she could have understood . . . maybe Marco could have . . .”

“Loyalty,” Armin says softly. “You’re loyal to both of them. So, you take responsibility for everything.”

“Not for everything,” Jean sniffles, sitting up again and blinking to try to stop the formation of new tears. God, he’s so tired of crying. “I don’t take the responsibility to actually fucking fix myself.”

“What would you fix about yourself?” Armin asks. He hasn’t removed his hand from Jean’s back. It doesn’t feel awkward and forced though—just a small connection.

The answer comes to Jean quickly. “I would develop a spine. I would fight for what I care about. I would do what I wanted with my life, regardless of whether I get stuck or not . . .”

Armin listens patiently as his list peters out. Then he offers, “In high school, you were very vocal about what you wanted.”

“It matched the story my mom wanted me to tell about my life,” Jean confesses in a low voice. “The phoenix rising from the ashes. But the only way to do that was through getting into a good college, a ‘proper’ stable partner, unlike my dad. I didn’t even realize I might want something different until I met Marco. And by then, it felt like a slap to how hard she worked for me to do otherwise . . . if I was loud in high school, it’s because I felt sure of myself when confronted with a bunch of conservative biggots. Marco challenged me . . .”

A wave of exhaustion suddenly rolls over Jean. “I must sound like an ass,” he mumbles, wiping his nose on a paper napkin Armin put on the table for him. “Some days I just . . . want to find a way to keep living my life. But it doesn’t feel possible. It doesn’t feel real anymore that I . . . I did those things . . . that we were ever together. Some days I wish our whole relationship had never happened, so that I wouldn't know how weak I actually am, that I'm capable of betraying . . . everything.”

Armin pats him on the back. “I get that. Well, sort of. You’re right, I can’t say I know exactly what you’re going through. But I get just wishing for the pain to go away, or wondering why you had to go through something—”

“But sometimes,” Jean interrupts, frantically hoping that Armin can understand. “Sometimes it just seems like a miracle that we ever met and that I ever got to like, know him, and start to become someone else, you know? It’s not all bad. Just . . . it ended badly. Because of me. Or, I don’t know,” he revises, patting his pocket again for the phone he knows isn’t there. “Sometimes it honestly doesn’t quite feel like it’s over yet. I’m just . . . stuck.”

He glances around and finally spots his phone, beat-up black case shining in the sun on Armin’s couch. He never replied to Marco’s dog photo last night, even though Messenger will show that he saw it. What will Marco think? That he’s being petty? They’re not supposed to get upset if they don’t immediately reply any more, but Jean still feels a sense of obligation.

“Have you ever thought about taking a break from both of them?” Armin asks, drawing Jean’s full attention back to him. “Like, not talking at all for a bit, to give yourself space to process?”

“I have taken space from my mom, I haven't been to see her since the final break up and I told her I needed to be my own person and not have her interfere in my relationships. . . she told me she got it, but I don't I know. It's the pandemic, she's checked in with me a couple times and she worries . . . And as for Marco . . . I have thought about it,” Jean admits in a quiet voice. “In fact, when I finally forced him to end it, I told him I couldn’t talk to him for a while because I didn’t know how to be his friend, only his lover. He understood but he wanted to keep talking. I . . . wanted it too, but mostly because it just like . . . gave me a sense of connection. So, I agreed to keep talking. I know I only get like a tiny fraction of him these days, and that hurts because like . . . I dunno, I feel ‘collected’? He doesn’t let go of important people in his life, past loves and friends. He says I’m still special to him, but it’s not the kind of special I want, and so sometimes when we talk, I just feel like . . . a failure. Actually, every time we talk, I do. And I know he’s . . . he’s got someone . . . and so it’s just like . . . the only friend I want to invest in right now is someone I’m pining for who’s already moved on . . . how pathetic.”

He wants to slap himself again, but Armin is here. So, he bounces his knee instead. It really is sad how stuck he is.

“Jean.” The sound of his name startles him a bit. Armin doesn’t usually address him directly. “I know you’re not asking me for my opinion, but I’m going to offer it anyway. I think you should take a break from talking to Marco.” Jean must be making a face because Armin rushes to add, “Maybe just for a bit, not necessarily forever or anything.”

Jean considers arguing. Some part of him wants to argue. But he knows, in his gut.

It’s time.

The shitty part is, he can’t decide if it’s a weak action or a strong action. Is he running away because he’s not tough enough to handle something? Or is he breaking away to try to stand on his own?

His brain revolts.

“But then I’ll be completely alone. Through my own actions sure, but . . . no one can replace Marco.” This is a child’s logic, Jean knows. He never has grown up. Dependent on his mother, dependent on Marco . . .

“You may never love again,” Armin agrees, surprising Jean with his own words from the night before. “But you definitely won’t be able to if you stay in Marco’s orbit. Maybe if you throw yourself out into space you’ll drift for a very long time. Maybe you’ll never encounter another planet. Maybe you’ll crash into one. Or maybe you’ll get pulled into a new orbit. This is a heavy-handed metaphor,” he concedes when Jean opens his mouth to point that out. “But maybe it can help. Just like in space, it’s not a bad thing to be an ice planet. It’s another way of existing.”

“I’ll be unhappy as an ice planet!” Jean splutters, finally finding words to respond to this extraordinary pronouncement. “I like . . . people. Well, I don’t, but I do.”

Armin nods. “Well, it’s good that people aren’t actually planets then, so it’s a lot easier to guide yourself into the paths of other people, when you’re ready.”

Jean nods. He does, on some level, understand what Armin means. And for the moment, in this sun-soaked apartment, he thinks he can feel the faintest trace of peace with the idea of letting go . . . as scary as it is.

“Are you sure you want to be an astronomer?” he asks, swiping away a small tear from one of his cheeks. “I think you’d make a pretty good therapist, to be honest.”

That startles a laugh out of Armin. “Ah, you caught me. A lot of what I was telling you now was stuff I learned talking my therapist.”

Jean smiles sheepishly. “Sorry, this is unpaid labor then.”

“No!” Armin rushes to explain. “No, it doesn’t work like that . . . I’m just . . . your friend. Besides, talking all this through with someone else reminds me of how to let go, because I can sometimes forget myself. I mean, Mikasa just asked me to call the Yeagers and check in with them. I feel guilty and ashamed right now even though I know I have a very good reason not to do that.”

That’s the second time Armin has called Jean his “friend.” Jean isn’t quite sure what the word means anymore. They hardly know each other, and yet they know each other very deeply. They don’t share a lot of tastes and yet they share these life struggles. Perhaps this is a new form of friendship. All he knows for certain is, he has to be there for Armin in the same way Armin has been there for him.

“Damn right you do,” he affirms. “You don’t owe them that.”

“Exactly,” Armin nods. “But my point is, sometimes those feelings can still creep up on me, even though I left the Yeagers almost a decade ago. Time helps you cope, but it can never make it as if it never happened.”

“Well, you’re still ahead of me,” Jean says. “I haven’t even started to move on yet.”

Armin pats his back again. “You have, I think. And it’s not so much a question of being a ‘ahead’ or not. But I’m happy if I can help you.”

Suddenly, Jean remembers the boxes. The flickering warmth that Armin’s words awakened in him dissipates. This conversation with Armin has helped him, but he doubts they will have an easy time keeping in contact once his new, well, friend moves away in the summer.

“You’ve been really kind.” Jean tries to smile, but it feels a bit forced. “I appreciate that.”

“Well, you’ve helped me,” Armin says again.

Jean waves this away. “So you say. It feels small though, comparatively.”

Armin shakes his head. “No, not just today. In high school, you helped me.”

This takes a moment to process. Armin withdraws his hand from Jean’s back and sits up in his chair, fidgeting a little and avoiding Jean’s gaze. “I know you wanted to ask me about who I am now or something, but I think you need to know some more things about my past first. To understand.”

He looks extremely uncomfortable. Jean isn’t quite sure what to say, only that, no matter what Armin tells him, he owes it to him to hear him out. It’s really the least he can do. So, he nods for Armin to continue.

“Well . . . you see, in high school . . . I was a little bit in love with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading so far! I don't think this chapter is particularly good, but I'm just kind of going with the flow of what my brain tells me to write ^^' The basic idea behind this chapter was planned, but I'm not sure I'm executing it well. Thanks for hanging in here with me.


	6. Direct Data, Entry Log 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Brief mention of existential/suicidal thoughts
> 
> Also it's time to stand up for Black Americans and demilitarize and defund our police forces. We can find other ways to manage community safety that isn't inherently racist and antagonistic to citizens. My story isn't about this, but I feel like it's important to say it on every platform I can.

“Sorry . . . ah, man. I swore I wasn’t going to spring that on you. It’s creepy, I know. Don’t worry, I’m not in love with you now . . . er, that sounds bad, maybe, but I mean it in a positive way as in . . . I’m not being a creep. You are worthy of love though! As everyon—well, no, I’m not sure everyone is, actually. I do, like, kind of think you have to like . . . love requires work. Work which you’ve done and are doing . . .

“Well, I know you think you aren’t doing enough . . . or maybe you’re just shaking your head because I’m freaking you out by dumping this on you . . . I dunno, I guess I can’t make you see that right now because you’re too wrapped up in what you did wrong . . .

“But my point is, while you are worthy of love, I don’t love you right now, and the way I loved you before . . . well, you know, teenage love is, uh, well, its own kind of thing. Not the same kind of love you’re talking about . . . I guess, I just want to tell you . . .

“. . . Look. The way you talk, you see yourself in this extremely negative way. You blame yourself for everything that happened between you and Marco and your mom, and since I wasn’t there, I can’t reassure you about what happened then specifically. And you can promise to advocate for your next partner and support your next partner better, to stand up to your mom . . . but right now you have this totalizing way of talking about your effect on people, like you think you’re poisonous. And I don’t know how else to tell you that’s not true, whatever mistakes you made.

“. . .

“And, well, I also know a thing or two about feeling like you’re dangerous to everyone around you. And it’s not actually so helpful for changing yourself into the person you want to be . . . in my experience it gets in the way . . .

“So . . . if you could just stay . . . and hear me out . . . besides, it feels weird to talk about intimate things with you without this truth being out there . . . m-maybe this is self-indulgent, I don’t know. But thanks for listening.

“So. I’ve told you a bit of how I grew up. I don’t know how much detail I should or want to go into right now. The most important pieces are that I grew up very uncomfortably. I knew I didn’t fit into the Yeagers’ very narrow worldview from a young age. I asked too many questions in church. That’s how it started. And every time I asked a question, I got shut down by an elder. I saw and heard all kinds of horrifying things that were community secrets, and I was taught to distrust my own instincts about others and the world. Eventually, I learned not to express myself at all.

“The horrible thing about this kind of cult is that it buries itself in the deepest recesses of your brain. You can’t stop the questions, so you learn to hate yourself for asking them. Every day as a kid, I prayed to God to take the devils out of my mind so that I would stop wondering about the wider universe, or questioning his existence, or, when I realized I was interested in men, that Satan would stop tempting me with thoughts about them. The world as the Yeagers wanted me to see it was a dangerous place . . . and you know, Eren, Mikasa, and I reacted very differently to that philosophy. Eren wanted to fight every threat his parents and the church elders placed in front of him, he wanted to wake up the rest of the ‘sheeple’ in this world; Mikasa wanted to keep us all safe and together, away from all the threats; and I . . . just wanted to see if the world was as bad as everyone was telling me.

“I was told I had a narrow, literal mind. I was a doubting Thomas, asking to see the stigmata in Jesus’ hands before I believed it was truly him. My faith was weak. When I didn’t speak, people stopped seeing me as so threatening. And honestly, I wondered if I was or had been the ungrateful, faithless child the church told me I was, if I was evil for questioning every little doctrine. It’s called ‘faith’ for a reason. These thoughts left me paralyzed, frozen.

“And I ultimately blamed myself.

“The worst thought I sometimes had, the deepest sin of my heart, was that I hated God for sending me to the Yeagers. Who were my birth family, and why had they given me up? Why did I have to be taken in by people who stifled me and stunted me, who taught me to be suspicious of everyone in the world except them? One summer, I tried to express these thoughts to a youth counselor who seemed sympathetic at Bible camp. She told me that God had brought me here to learn faith from the Yeagers and Trost’s community of believers, and that I would be grateful for their guidance in the end. I felt so dirty and sick after that.

“. . .

“I want to say that it wasn’t all that bad. Even saying it out loud right now, it still feels impossible that all of this happened to me. I wonder if I’m exaggerating, if I’m still just being ungrateful. Mikasa is sometimes able to confirm my memories though, and with years of therapy I can say all this with minimum doubt. It was a cult.

“We were in and out of homeschooling up until eighth grade, when Carla had to start working to help us make ends meet. That’s how we ended up in public school as high schoolers, though we were given a lot of warnings about the dangers of communism, evolution, and believing in global warming. We were primed to be suspicious of the school, and at first, I was suspicious because I was suspicious of everything . . . but I didn’t find it to be so shocking. We were living in a very conservative time in a very conservative area, and there were many people who may not have been part of my church community, but who shared ideologies with them. Even among the teachers! That was extremely confusing to me—where was all this radical leftist ideology I had been warned about?

“I think I actually wanted to confront it. I wanted to be challenged, because that seemed to be the only way to get at the truth.

“And, to be honest, you were the only one presenting challenges.

“Don’t laugh! It’s true.

“Like, when you sat down for the pledge of allegiance. I was told by my parents to participate in it despite their suspicion of the government to blend in. But you sat down and refused to say it, even that one time that Shadis gave you a lecture about ‘our boys fighting for your freedoms in the Middle East.’ You said the war was neocolonialist. I went to the school library and looked up that word.

“Seriously, don’t laugh! Maybe we look back now and realize we were pretentious white kids who weren’t risking a whole lot, but I’d never seen someone successfully stand up to authority the way you did, and you did it at every turn. I’ll never forget you shouting down Eren about gay rights after they passed Prop 8 in California. Or backing up Hange, one of the few liberal teachers in the school, about the reality of climate change. I saw you getting shoved in the hallways sometimes, and you shoved back. I . . . I thought I was supposed to hate you and confront you myself, but even then, I knew that I admired you . . .

“ . . . haha, sorry, I shouldn’t laugh, but I just remembered when you confronted the army recruiters who set up shop at the career fair every year. You said that they were ‘preying on the poor who didn’t have other choices for funding their educations.’ Eren punched you for that right in front of them. And yet, later that day, I saw you taking down the posters they had put up around school, even while your eye was still swelling.

“I thought, ‘that’s strength.’ I wanted it for myself. And then I felt guilty. The Devil is supposed to appear strong and admirable, and I thought I should probably think of you as corrupted by him. That maybe I should try to save you . . . but I was weak, and I couldn’t. I wanted you to stay as you were, every day putting the same questions I was asking in my head into words.

“. . .

“I think, when you’re young, its especially hard to know if you want to be with someone or if you want to be that person. Actually, that’s always a bit of a problem, isn’t it? I mean, crushes and love are complex. You said yourself that you appreciated Marco because he challenged you. Romantic feelings . . . I think they can come from an extreme pull towards a person you admire, a combination of being inspired by them and just appreciating them as they are. I already told you, I admired you. You were smart and you spoke your mind, and, well, I had a fascination.

“. . .

“You talked a lot about leaving Trost. It started as a recurring kind of daydream that somehow, I would get to go with you. It wasn’t even explicitly romantic at first. Just, somehow, I’d get into the same college as you and finally we could talk away from Eren and my church and all our rightwing classmates. And . . . oh God, this is embarrassing. In these daydreams I imagined that you . . . you would see me as I was and appreciate me. Accept me. Validate all of my questions. I spent . . . well, a fucking embarrassing amount of time with you in my head. Whenever I asked a question about the world, I imagined you egging me on.

“. . .

“. . . embarrassing really is the word of the hour . . .

“. . . I thought I had enough distance from this to explain it to you. It’s been ten years. But shit, it’s still really awkward to talk about old feelings. I just feel like I need to finish what I started now . . . I guess . . . if that’s okay?

“. . . Oof, okay.

“. . . It took me a while to realize that my fantasies were turning into something else. Something, well, gay, you might say. The only reason I bring this up at all is so that you can know that I really struggled in my mind for a few years once I realized that I had romantic feelings for you. I still admired you, but in my narrow Christian framework for understanding the world, I thought maybe you really were a temptation sent to test me by Satan, that maybe questioning one dogma really was the slippery slope to homosexual leftist ideology . . . because you were all of that in one for me. So, I avoided you and creepily watched you from afar . . .

“. . . remember that time we got assigned to work together on a graphing project for calculus, after we took the AP test? I was . . . so conflicted. Delighted and terrified. We met in the library for a few mornings that week, and I genuinely thought God was testing me, and that I was failing because I had put more thought into how I looked those days than I usually did. I could barely speak to you, and you didn’t say much to me that wasn’t related to the project. Except, you always asked me how I was. And then, when my stomach rumbled loudly while we were quietly working, you excused yourself to the bathroom and came back with a snack bar from the vending the machine. You handed it to me like it was nothing, and I bet you don’t remember that, but I wondered if you were so evil and tempting, why were you also so casually kind?

“. . . you’re laughing because you feel awkward, right? Sorry, I know it’s so weird to call someone tempting. Like ‘nice guy’-level weird. But you have to understand, I borrowed Mikasa’s hair straightener all those days to try to get something closer to a cool hair cut like you had, even though I risked a lecture from Grisha about how men shouldn’t care about their appearances.

“And after the project was over, you drew me a picture as like, a thank you. I knew you did that for people sometimes, I’d seen you do it for others. You probably don’t remember, but it was kind of an anime hero version of myself defeating a math problem. I still have it somewhere, with my old things. It meant a lot to me because it wasn’t just a picture given to me by my crush it was . . . a sign that someone saw me. And didn’t think I was a quiet loser or a corrupt doubter.

“ . . .

“This is a lot, I know. But maybe it can help? I don’t know.

“And not just by telling you how much you helped me, because you did. And I’m sure you helped many others just by speaking your mind. I think . . . m-maybe I’m just projecting myself onto others, but I think a lot of people trusted you because you always said exactly what you were thinking, and even if you were prickly or angry, you did have a casual kindness about you, a way of seeing the human in everyone while still calling them out on their bullshit. Even Eren.

“. . . I think maybe you could still see the human in Eren better than I can these days. I grew up with him, so I remember times when he could be . . . gentler. Or more thoughtful. But he responded to the trauma of our childhood very differently than me and . . . I don’t know. I don’t think he can be brought back.

“. . .

“. . . Thank you. My therapist says not to guilt myself about it too. Most days I don’t. Eren is not a project for me. I have to let go.

“But that’s been a hard thing for me, you know? Especially in this world that basically bombards us with the importance of family. I had to wrench myself away from mine completely to save myself from being swallowed.

“And . . . knowing you helped me with that.

“Or . . . I should rephrase that. I knew and idealized a version of you, just as you knew a version of me. We were never friends in high school, we only saw each other from a distance. But I think . . . seeing you now, I think that I wasn’t really wrong about who you were, and I don’t think you’ve changed fundamentally.

“Don’t make that face! It’s true. You almost broke your toe when you got upset about healthcare workers aren’t getting paid enough. And you liked to be challenged by Marco . . . and you’re still kind of beating yourself up.

“In high school, you would tell self-deprecating jokes a lot. Always in this kind of aggressive way though? Like ‘I know I’m just a loser’ or ‘I’m just a selfish asshole who wants a better life for myself’ . . . honestly, I liked that about you. You weren’t self-righteous and self-assured like Eren. You criticized yourself when you criticized the others . . . I just, trusted you more. But I didn’t realize it ran this deep in you . . . right now it seems kind of like . . . well . . . self-hate. Which, like, I relate to. I know what that’s like.

“And now I wonder if you felt this way in high school too, but maybe it’s just out in the open more? Maybe, like . . . cleaning out a wound. You have to treat the underlying sickness before it heals? That’s how it was for me at least. I had to find ways to talk about how my family hurt me, how society hurt me and stifled me; I had to fight against this impulse to put it all back on myself. You . . . just seeing you, I mean . . . helped me imagine other versions of myself. Other ways to be.

“That was how I saw you in high school. Questioning of everything, even yourself. Willing to push back against authority. And determined to leave and break away from our black hole of a town.

“Yes, it was a black hole. Sometimes people would go downstate for college, but they always ended up right back in Trost to start their families . . . so many generations of locals . . . I used to wonder if my birth parents were local or if I got shipped there . . . I wondered if I was from another planet . . . maybe that was also part of my fascination with space.

“You also felt like you were from somewhere else, that we had you on loan. You were too good for us. Yeah, that sounds like an awful, elitist thing to say, but that’s how I saw you. Of course you would leave. Of course you would manage it. And the closer we got to graduation day, the clearer it became to me that I would not be able to make it.

“. . .

“I kind of hated myself for that. For not being able to leave as soon as I graduated. Now, I blame the Yeagers more. I was afraid of how they would react if I applied to go away for college. They wanted me to get a job and to stay local. Of course they valued the idea of me making money, but they also didn’t want me to get a ‘liberal’ education. One that would give me more tools to resist them. And I felt . . . stuck. If I couldn’t get a scholarship, if I didn’t get the money . . . then I’d be living with them still anyway, and they’d know I had tried to escape . . .

“. . .

“I don’t know how to express . . . how disappointed in myself I was. If I had just worked harder. If I had taken more time to get college materials and apply for scholarships. I know now that the education system was rigged against me, that the years of abuse I suffered in my church community and with the Yeagers also held me back . . . but at the time I thought only about how awful I was. How I could never be as strong as you.

“. . .

“Don’t put yourself down. I know now that was the wrong way to think about it. And I know also that it’s not good to compare ourselves and where we are. You had tools back then to do things that I didn’t. Maybe now I have tools that you don’t. The only thing we can do now is try to share them.

“Yeah, it is deep, I know. Like I said, I’ve been in therapy for a long time.

“My first year of community college, I was a wreck. I felt so dismally trapped. I was going to get sucked into the blackhole . . . or I was going to kill myself. I’m sorry to put it out there like this, I know it’s heavy. But I began to wonder what the point of everything was. I thought, why did God give me this questioning mind, why did God give me these homosexual feelings to struggle with? What kind of God tests his creations so much, about things that, when I reasoned them out, didn’t seem like they should be bad? If I had to live this half-life, trapped with my adopted family forever, I felt like maybe I should stop existing, just to spare myself the pain.

“But I had a good advisor at the college, one who saw that I was on the edge and got me to talk to her a little bit. It was her who encouraged me to think about transferring after I finished my Associate’s and her who helped me find a couple local jobs to save up to move out. The Yeagers didn’t question me too much, I didn’t tell them how much I was really working and I gave them a small part of my income to deflect suspicion. Which is like . . . no one should have to do stuff like that. It was awful.

“I don’t think I was strong. I think I was lucky. I know I had help. And I had some privileges. I think the process of escaping abusive family situations should not be so hard, and that many people are trapped in situations like Mikasa. A kind of half escape. I don’t want to presume, but maybe you know something about this too? It’s hard to pull out of family relationships or equalize them, and sometimes the moment when we try to pull away is the moment they surprise us . . .”

“. . . sorry. I think the point I’m building up to is that, in my mind, I had a hard time pulling away from my relationship to you too. My idealization of you. My desire to become you. It helped me, I know. Definitely. I needed a role-model and I needed to envision our relationship to even began to conceptualize my sexuality. I needed someone to see me. But I also became . . . weirdly dependent on my feelings for you. When I first came to California to finish my B.A., I thought I had done it to be like you. I thought I owed you for that . . . it’s complicated, because I started telling you all this because I wanted you to know that you have a positive effect on the world, but you were also in the way of me like . . . acknowledging what I had accomplished myself and also the how lucky I had been. It took me years of therapy to process that. To see the complex picture.

“Which you were a part of. Most definitely. And not in a poisonous or negative way.

“You’ve hurt Marco, and you’re hurting yourself. You’ve also been hurt, by your mom and I think by Marco too, a little bit. It’s hard, but no human can be 100% safe and we’re going to hurt other people. That’s the nature of being close. But you also haven’t been 100% dangerous. Whatever it is you think you need to do in your next relationship to communicate better and stand up for yourself and your partner, you can and should do. But you’re not a failure and you don’t always hurt others, and if you’re starting from a place of assuming you will, you’ll close yourself off.

“When I first got to California, I didn’t immediately become the person I wished I could be. I was still timid, and I still held myself away from people because I was afraid to hurt them with my questioning. It was even harder to start romantic relationships with other men, because I hadn’t worked through all of my hang ups about it being a sin, and I didn’t know very much about sex, and, well, because I was a bit stuck on you. I compared everyone to you, and no one I met was exactly what I’d been picturing. I had to let go of you and realize that, well, I was idealizing you and I didn’t know who you were anymore to even begin to try with others. And it was a mess. But I also, eventually, had good relationships.

“Just to pre-empt you beating yourself up, it was also good for me to kind of have a starting point to think about what I wanted from a relationship. Again, your influence on me was complex, and not ever wholly good or wholly bad. I tend to think it was very good, and that a lot of what I worked through was stuff I would have struggled with anyway.

“And also, I eventually realized I was in love with an idea . . . and this idea was who I wanted to be. In a weird way . . . it had become self-love? Well, self-love is kind of a loaded term, like it can sound like narcissism . . . maybe just the ability to see yourself as loveable and worthy of love?

“. . .

“. . . yeah, it’s harder than it seems.

“. . . I think . . . as an astronomer, I can understand this impulse for easy narratives. They order the messy realities of our universe. Like that you’re terrible and your influence is always bad. Or that we only have one love, and if we blow it there’s never any other chances because you don’t deserve even the possibility of love anymore. Hell, when I came here and found out you were living on the floor above me, after all these years . . . under certain circumstances, that could seem like fate, right? But I realized I didn’t know you and that there’s a lot of pressure in being someone’s . . . idol. For lack of a better word. And I had just broken up when I moved here myself . . . my old roommate was actually my old partner, and we split because he didn’t want to be long distance after he got a job in Florida . . . and ‘fate’ has a pretty strong gravitational pull when you’re lost and alone and you don’t know what’s next for you . . .

“So. I think that the universe is a series of coincidences that, while not random, are not necessarily ‘fated.’ We are all bound together, we all push and pull each other, and it’s impossible to know sometimes where one reaction begins and another ends. But, unlike the planets, we also have our own agency and our power to push and pull others and . . . well, with our agency, we can do good . . .

“. . . I’m sorry. This is a lot. I’m not even sure that it, well, makes sense. I just wanted to tell you . . . I’m not in love with you right now. But you are loveable, and you can be a force for good . . . even if you can’t see it in yourself just yet. And I think . . . I think you need to be able to see it in yourself before you can accept other’s love so . . . be careful with yourself. Please.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha, this took me a long time. I don't think I'm ready to write this, but here's my attempt. And also like, I struggle with sustained first-person narrative. Like, I guess it's possible that Armin is saying all this without much interruption from Jean, but it's hard to imagine and his throat must hurt and also maybe he wouldn't be able to say everything so clearly.
> 
> Er, anyway. Thanks to everyone reading! :)


	7. Drifting in Space

They sit in silence for a while after Armin trails off, fidgeting and uncomfortable. Jean doesn’t know how to bear the weight of this confession—it seems to be half an attempt to bolster his spirits and half advice about . . . what? How to pull away from his own family and be the person he wants to be? How to move on from Marco while honoring what he gave Jean?

“I’m . . . I need to go shower,” he finally pronounces, standing up. Armin looks at him, but Jean doesn’t have the energy or mind space to read his expression.

“I—okay.”

Something else needs to be said. Jean doesn’t know what that is yet and so it feels foolish to try, but he opens his mouth and lets words fall out anyway. “Thank you. For breakfast. And for talking. I need to think.”

And then he walks out of the apartment.

Up the deserted staircase, bright light streaming through a window on the landing.

Some people outside are talking. Their voices are distorted and unintelligible.

He finishes his exodus back up to his apartment. The curtains are pulled closed and there’s a funny smell in the small kitchen area. Who knows what’s rotted inside his fridge these past few weeks? The thought tires him. He wants to go back to sleep . . . but he’s also dirty. Profoundly dirty. God, he wishes he could just scrub his skin clean off and start completely new. That he could wipe down his whole apartment, cleanse it of all his sins and memories, and sleep peacefully as a newly baptized soul, pure.

Turning away from his mess, he stumbles into the bathroom and turns on the shower tap.

Under the faucet, facing the spray, he can’t even summon the energy to cry. This bath is nothing like what he actually wants, that purity he can’t actually attain. Confessing to Armin, while cathartic in the moment, is but one tiny step. A revealing of the stains upon his heart. And, even more shameful, he had not truly laid himself bare. He had withheld the details of the summer he abandoned Marco, traumatized the person he claimed to love, all for the sake of holding onto the image of a life he was fairly sure he didn’t want.

He presses his head against the tiles on the wall.

And Armin thinks that he should see himself as worthy of love. Because, before he had ever met Marco or failed to rebel against his mother, he had fancied himself “challenging.”

Armin had loved that image of him, just as Marco had.

Jean had failed to live up to that image.

“It doesn’t matter if I change,” he mutters to himself, ignoring the water dripping from his hair into his mouth. “I can’t make it right. Nothing can make it right. I had a chance to make it right . . . I fucked up.”

Pain spikes between his shoulder blades. His chest aches.

He lost.

He should do better. If he ever feels safe enough to start another romantic relationship, he should do better. It’s what he will have to do, but it doesn’t change the pain inside him, it doesn’t ease the self-hatred inside him. Who knows when that chance will be? And how will he continue to live, in the meantime?

After washing himself, he steps out and finds the cleanest clothes available, stuffed in the back of his chest of drawers. He surveys his room, the light blocked by the curtains and the debris strewn everywhere. Without making a conscious decision to do so, he begins to clean.

It doesn’t heal his soul. He doesn’t even feel a fraction of a bit better, it’s just something he has to do. Sort this pile of papers, tie up that bag of trash, put this laundry in a bin to take to the laundromat. He forgets about his phone in his pocket; he pushes back the pain of Armin’s admiration and attempt to help and moves through these menial tasks one by one. Eventually, when the floor is clear, the fridge is empty, and the bed is stripped, he opens the curtains and windows to air out the room with the crisp spring air, ties a bandana around his face, and gathers up his laundry bin and a sketchbook.

That afternoon, he sits in the laundromat at the corner, six feet away from the two other patrons, and begins to work on a commission that is long overdue, a series of demons for an RPG monster manual. His chest continues to hurt, and his fingers shake, but he must do this.

If he’s deciding to live, he must do these things. Not because they feel good or they mean anything, but simply because they must be done.

Back in his apartment, he sorts his clean clothes and makes his bed in silence. Then he cooks for himself, just some pasta. His phone sits dark upon his desk. He’s turned it off. After he eats, he draws until his vision blurs that evening, and he lays down in his bed.

He expects to stare at the ceiling forever while his mind torments him, as it has for so many nights these past months. Instead, he closes his eyes and darkness overtakes him.

* * *

Upon waking up the next morning, Jean is hit with the realization that he has to apologize to Armin. He should go downstairs, as soon as possible, to atone for walking away when someone tried to help him.

He also knows that he must message Marco and tell him that he needs to take a break. He’s not ready to be Marco’s true friend, he’s burdened by these selfish, ulterior motives and, deep down, a desire to prove himself. Friendship is not possible right now, and to hold Marco here with the hope that it is will hurt them both in the end. He can’t wait for Marco to absolve him for the trauma he’s caused, and he can’t wait for an opportunity for them to be together again.

When he finally sends the message, Marco replies that he understands. He will wait for if and when Jean thinks he can speak again. Jean doesn’t know what else to say. He has no idea what the future will bring. Only that he has to let himself drift out into that unknown, that he has to find a way to be the person he wants to be, the man who stands up for the people he loves and what he believes in, the man who can be true to his values and seek the life he wants, regardless of what his family or society tells him. He can no longer lean on Marco, and he can only return to this relationship when they are equals and he is not dependent.

Jean feels his does not deserve Marco’s understanding. Or Armin’s understanding. But perhaps it is not about deserving at this point.

He still does not feel better. Nothing he does makes him feel good. He continues to do what he must in order to live. Necessity; if nothing will fix the mess he made, he can only take steps to not hurt more people.

When he knocks on Armin’s door, he wonders if the other man will open it. He left Armin after he had made himself vulnerable in an effort to help Jean. Jean had put himself first again. It does not escape him that Armin has not messaged him since he abruptly departed the other day, and if Armin does not open up to him now, he’ll send an apology message and let his high-school-classmate-turned-downstairs-neighbor be.

But Armin opens the door only a moment after Jean knocks. He’s not wearing his mask, as if he somehow knew who his visitor would be. He’s also holding a roll of packing tape.

Armin opens his mouth to speak, but Jean holds up a hand to stop him.

“Thank you for everything yesterday. I’m sorry I ran away.”

Armin shakes his head and stands aside, indicating that Jean should enter. Hesitating, worrying that he won’t behave himself well, Jean steps in.

“I understand that it was a lot. Not just what I was saying, but everything you told me. And I was . . . I was talking like I understood everything you went through. Giving you advice when maybe you just wanted me to listen.” He holds out a hand for Jean to shake. “I dumped a lot on you too. If you want, we can table this for now and just . . . spend time together.”

Jean feels the tiniest smile stretch his face in spite of himself. He takes Armin’s hand and shakes it firmly. “I would like that, thanks. But also . . . you were trying to help me. And I don’t see at as dumping on me. Or at least, it was mutual dumping.” He nods to the packing tape clutched in Armin’s other hand. “I also wanted to ask you about that. I . . . are you moving?”

Armin looks sheepish. “Yes. I . . . I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how. I’m going back west after I defend my thesis, to teach in Colorado.”

Jean nods. “My confession is that I heard you talking about that on the phone with Mikasa. When are you, uh, leaving?”

“Sometime in July,” Armin says, walking over to a box in the middle of his living room and folding down the flaps. “With the pandemic, I’m having trouble figuring out housing. There’s a bit of a tech boom happening around the university, and it’s almost as expensive to find a place to live there as here which is just . . . I don’t know. Somehow I keep ending up in the priciest places.”

The roll of tape screeches as Armin secures the box. Jean watches him take out a sharpie and scroll “books” across the cardboard.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he continues, his tone subdued. “It’s weird but . . . I didn’t want it hanging over us when the pandemic first hit. Also, I wasn’t sure if Reiss would initiate a hiring freeze like a lot of other universities. It’s bullshit, but they’re probably keeping my contract because I’m in STEM and my research will bring money . . . ah, sorry. That’s not the point. I should have said something.”

Jean shakes his hand and steps forward to help Armin tape up the next box. “No, I get it. We were both keeping secrets.”

Armin is silent for a while, concentrating ferociously on labeling the box. Finally, still not looking at Jean, he ventures. “I’ve had . . . a weird idea. You can tell me it’s weird. I won’t be offended. But I think I need to voice it. You . . . you’re job. It’s like, something you don’t need to be in NYC for, right?”

The question should confuse Jean. Or worry him. But he feels strangely calm in giving his answer. “Yeah. It’s all online at the moment, via commission.”

“Well, I was thinking . . . I would like a roommate to help me cover the bills. And maybe it’s presumptuous of me, but maybe you’d like a break from New York for a bit too? I feel like I have to say it because of what I told you last night, but this isn’t a romantic thing. I was just thinking this morning, I like your company and, well, I think we could manage well together, at least for a little bit.”

He finally meets Jean’s eyes with that strange intensity. Jean holds his gaze and realizes that he does truly trust Armin. And he’s not ready to be an ice planet, even though he thinks he has to learn to stand on his own. Maybe there’s a way he can stand on his own and alongside others?

Maybe he can just try.

“I . . . you know, what? I’m in.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who read this! I don't think I was really ready to write it, so I'm sorry for the abrupt and easy ending here. I'm really unhappy with the last few chapters as well . . . I don't find enough growth in Jean. It is what it is. Thanks for witnessing it though. I appreciate it. <3


End file.
